


Veriform's 'Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope'

by MazeltovCocktail



Series: Veriform's 'Star Wars' [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-27 01:20:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7597846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MazeltovCocktail/pseuds/MazeltovCocktail
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Palpatine holds the galaxy in an iron grip, his laws and taxes ever more onerous, his slavers and inquisitors more brutal every year. Now the fledgling rebellion against his reign will be tested against the might of the greatest weapon ever wielded by human hands while two children, separated by an ocean of stars, may be the galaxy's only hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY...

STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE

_The galaxy languishes beneath the Empire's boot-heel_

_rebellion after rebellion quelled by the Stormtrooper legions_

_and the incredible might of the Imperial fleet._

_The Emperor has enshrined himself as an all-powerful dictator_

_and rules from Coruscant with the aid of his lieutenant_

_and apprentice in the dark arts of the Sith_

_the deadly and unpredictable Darth Vader._

_Hope stands on the edge of a knife, ready to plummet_

_into a future of oppressive and authoritarian rule._

_Two children, separated by an ocean of void_

_may be the galaxy's last chance..._

CHAPTER ONE: BINARY SUNRISE

LEIA

Leia's uncle held her small hand in his rough, callused one as they walked over the dunes in the fading light of their dull world's second sun. They paused a while to watch wild dewbacks moving in a herd across the sands. Muscles shifting under pebbled hides burned grey-green in the sunset, big mouths crushing moisture from sparse vegetation while heavy tails swept back and forth. A big old bull let out a moaning cry and the others echoed it.

"I want aunt Beru," she said. They'd been walking for hours and her feet were sore.

"And I'd like a hot cup of Corellian whiskey," her uncle answered. He was a worn-looking man, tall and solid with a short cap of greying hair and a face tanned and roughened by the desert suns. "It's not far now, Leia. You're seven now; be a big girl and don't complain."

Leia blew out a moody breath and scuffed her shoes through the dirt. Their path grew stony as the day wore on. They left the dunes behind them, passing into a narrow gorge with red stone walls and a floor of rattling scree. Leia gripped her uncle's hand more tightly. She'd never been into the maze of canyons and gulleys north of their little moisture farm. Her uncle had strictly forbidden it. Everyone knew that a witch lived there, a crone who dealt with Sand People and read fortunes in the guts of womp rats. The older children talked about her, sometimes.

"I'm scared," she said. Her voice echoed small from the stones.

"Be quiet," said her uncle.

They walked on, their shadows chasing them along the canyon walls. The sky was huge above them. Scant clouds scudding there. They crossed a sulfur flow, an egg-smelling vein of undrinkable water overarched by a bridge made of hide and ronto bones, something Tuskens might have built, or one of the hermits who lived out in the deep deserts of the Dune Sea. Leia's uncle hummed to himself as he walked, but there was no joy to it. Tuneless, nervous. He'd been angry earlier when she'd hid from him among the junk and half-completed projects in his workshop. "I don't want to go into the desert," she'd wailed. "I don't want to go!"

"You're going," he'd said, his hand like a vise on her arm as he'd pulled her out of the cupboard.

Bad dreams for a week after she'd heard him mention it to aunt Beru. "Time to take the girl out there," he'd said one night. Leia, hiding in the hall, listened with trepidation. Breath bated.

"Kenobi can stuff himself," Beru had replied tartly. They were in the kitchen, he seated at the counter with a drink, she canning the last of the gur-fruit. "She's too young."

"She's going," said her uncle.

"If you won't stand up for her, I will." Fire in her aunt's soft voice.

"He's a wanted man." Her uncle downed his drink and poured another. A finger of golden liquid bought dearly in Mos Espa. "You think he wouldn't come and take her? That other one...she's worse. You say what you need to, but she's going."

Beru stood, jar in hand, anger written on her face, and then she let her shoulders slump. Fruit swam like molten gold in the old glass jar she held. "I'm afraid, Owen."

He rose and kissed her on the cheek, then took her in his arms. "I know," he said, "but we don't have a choice."

That night Leia slept and saw a strange vault-ceilinged place where light shone through tall windows onto little corpses under shrouds. A voice came through the drifting smoke and shadow. A figure stalking in the dark, and words that rolled like mist over the floor.

The next morning she asked her aunt again about her father.

"He died in the war," Beru told her, hurrying through the morning's chores with uncharacteristic brusqueness. Her eyes red-rimmed. "I didn't know him well, dear."

The desert cooled as she walked on beside her uncle.

"Carry me," she said, tugging on his arm.

"You're too heavy these days," he answered.

"Where are we going?"

Tramp of his worn-out boots through gravel and grit. He slowed his pace, ran his free hand through his sweat-matted hair. In a shaded bend they paused to rest, washing down radiation tablets with water cooled in their thermal canteens. Leia sat on a ridge of wind-carved stone and swung her legs over a crevasse where the bones of a womp rat lay. "I want to know about my father."

"He died in the war." A tired answer, often given.

"What war?"

"You know what war." He rose, knees cracking. "Get moving. We're almost out of light."

Night fell. Leia bit back tears as she stumbled on over the canyon's winding floor, her heels blistered, her legs leaden. She wanted to go back to the farm, to hear aunt Beru's voice reading their story, the one about the Jawa warrior and the old krayt dragon, and then to drift off into sleep. No dreams. No canyon. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her tunic, sniffling.

"Stop that," said her uncle, not unkindly. He pulled her onward with a gentle tug.

"But I don't want to go." The tears came then. He picked her up, too heavy or no, and trudged onward as she slipped into unconsciousness with her head pillowed on his shoulder.

* * *

Leia woke near dawn, the red light of the first sun wavering on the horizon, the walls of the gorge replaced by open sky. Her uncle had stopped moving. She could hear his ragged breath, smell his sweat through the bantha wool of his tunic. They were on a mesa overlooking the dunes, a crumbling scarp of rock and sand. High crags above, dwarf trees clinging to the slopes. Urusai roosted in the branches, their wattled beaks agape in the cool early morning air.

"I've brought her," Owen said.

Leia lifted her head. She rubbed sleep from her eyes, squinting, and saw a little hut of pressed dirt and old duracrete standing on the mesa's lip. A woman in a heavy black skirt and a form-fitting moisture sleeve that covered her from chin to ankles sat in a folding canvas chair outside it. She was lean and bony, arms corded with muscle, head shaved bald and peeling in the bitter sunlight. She smoked a deathstick in a slim bantha-horn holder. Her eyes were colorless, her small feet bare. She set a queasy feeling in the pit of Leia's stomach.

"It's all right," Owen said. He set Leia down, then knelt and hugged her, squeezing too hard. "I'll be back in a week. What should you do while I'm gone?"

"Be a big girl," Leia said. Her voice trembled. She felt too light, like her feet were going to

leave the ground at any minute. Like she might be blown away by the hissing wind. The witch regarded her with those pale, pale eyes. An urusai flapped down from the cliffs to land ungainly on her shoulder. It screamed and shook its wattles.

"You hurt her," Owen growled, speaking as he straightened up, "and there'll be hell to pay. You hear?"

The witch said nothing. Owen's words faded.

Her uncle's hands left Leia's shoulders. She heard him walk away, back down the mesa's crooked slope and toward the gorge. Gone into the shifting sands.

The pale witch rose, smoke leaking from her nostrils, and crossed toward the spot where Leia stood. Her urusai took flight with an indignant squawk, lofting itself off the mesa and out over the dunes below, dwindling to a speck. Watching it, Leia lost track of the witch until a bony claw seized her chin and dragged her eyes up to pale pits in a sunburned face, narrow, thin, teeth crowded in a scornful mouth.

"You look weak," said the witch.

Tears stung Leia's eyes. She forced herself to meet the witch's glare, though her shoulders shook and she wanted nothing but for her uncle to return and say that it was all a joke, a trick, a bad dream. She knew he wouldn't, though.

"Are you afraid, child?"

That voice, so much thinner and colder than Aunt Beru's. The witch was taller than Leia's aunt, too, and smelled like sweat and death sticks. Her fingers dug cruelly into Leia's face.

"No," Leia managed to choke out as the first sobs welled up.

The witch released her and stepped back, folding her thin arms. A hot wind from the desert stirred her skirts and blew red grit across the mesa, scouring woman and girl, hissing against the worn bell of the cliffside hut. A strange smile crossed the witch's features. Gone in an instant. "You will be."

She turned and went. Leia, swiping mucous from her lip with one small fist, followed after her through the billowing dust, aching for home.

LUKE

Luke walked at his father's side into the Senatorium. Bail wore a stiff, high-collared robe in senatorial black. The other senators, all of them human except for a nervous-looking Ithorian and a smug, cream-furred Bothan, filed around them in a nervous stream down the chamber's narrow throat. A few had aides, fewer still children or wards in tow. Red-robed Imperial Guards stood in silent ranks along the walls, black expanses of basalt rising a thousand meters to vaulted ceilings and frescoes lost to distance and gloom. The Imperial Palace was vast enough to boast its own climate, ragged clouds swirling in its highest reaches.

"You must be silent, Luke," said Bail. "You are to neither move nor speak until the session is over and the Emperor has dismissed us. Am I understood?"

"Yes, Father," said Luke. He wiped his sweating hands on his tunic, watching a purple-faced Moff in a uniform dripping with commendations upbraid a silent Imperial Guard for checking his identification.

"Do you know who I am?" the Moff blustered, snatching back his ident chit and thrusting out his chin in defiance.

The red-robed guardsman, tongueless, face hidden by his tall red helm, said nothing. Hundreds of his brothers at arms lined the grand processional, still as statues except where they glided into the crowd like clawfish to conduct random checks and sweeps. The sniffers built into the walls, Bail had said, were sensitive enough to detect even the smallest explosive devices and the merest traces of poison, but a man could be a weapon, too. The Guard existed to winnow out threats no sensor could detect.

One passed within a yard of Bail and Luke, robes whispering over the processional floor. Luke fought to keep from flinching. He looked up at his father, but Bail's expression was stony, his posture stiff and distant. He didn't so much as blink when the guardsman paused to examine him. They carried on down the processional and the Guard looked away, reorienting his attention on the hapless Ithorian already beset by two other robed sentinels and a leashed massif snuffling and snapping at the slow-moving sentient's robes.

"Father—"

Bail shook his head. "I said quiet, Luke."

Stung, Luke glanced back over his shoulder as the massif's baying echoed from the walls. The Ithorian was underway again, but one of the guardsmen trailed behind him like a blood-red shadow. The alien senator looked uneasy, fussing with his robes and breathing heavily through his twin mouths. Luke's tutors were always circumspect when it came to Imperial policy toward aliens, but Luke knew enough at nine years old to guess the truth. They were being pushed out, ground underfoot, their rights in the Senate slowly stripped away.

 _Aren't we going to do something?_ Luke's nails dug into his palms.

* * *

The Senatorium opened up vast and dark before them. What faint echoes of their footsteps had survived in the processional faded into its lofty recesses. A rail-less bridge of durasteel, thin as a wrist, spanned a bottomless pit to where the boxes of the Senators hung suspended from the tiered branches of a poorly-lit frame. Aides, translators, and other staff already waited there. Luke followed his father to Alderaan's box where the royal flag hung bright against the monumental chamber's oppressive gloom. Bail's protocol droid, C-3PO, stood waiting for them in Etiquette Mode. He bowed stiffly at their approach, but Luke paid him no mind. Something else had his attention.

The Emperor's vacant throne, hanging above the void like a spider at the center of a vast and swaying web, loomed thirty meters higher than the senate's tiered seats. Great swags of silk which vanished up into the darkness hung from the throne's canopy and from the glow-lances radiating from its crown, giving it the look of a grandee's howdah, or of a stage scaled and focused to exalt a single occupant. The throne itself waited within like the dry socket of a pulled tooth, darkness pooled around it.

Minutes passed as the senators took their places. In a special gallery above, the Council of Moffs muttered and quarreled in an unruly mob around the skeletal figure of their leader, Grand Moff Tarkin. Luke knew the man's gaunt face from the holo-news. He was always making speeches about the glory of the Empire and the importance of loyalty, and of reporting any sign of wrongdoing. In person he looked starved, his features severe to the point of parody. Luke felt a surge of instinctive dislike as the thin man smiled coldly at some joke made by a squat, sweating Moff standing at his left hand.

"Luke."

Bail's voice cut through Luke's idle investigation of the vast Senatorium. Luke didn't need to ask why. Silence had fallen. The Emperor had arrived.

He sat, the hoary wreck of him, in the shadows of his imperial throne, his yellow eyes gleaming in the darkness, his jaundiced and ruined skin shifting as he smiled. A thicket of brown teeth revealed, then shut away again behind ulcerous lips. Luke swallowed. His heart pounded in his chest. Sweat dampened his armpits and trickled down his back. His knees shook. The chamberlain at Palpatine's right hand seemed like an afterimage, a frail thing lost in his shadow.

"The Imperial Senate is now in session."

The Emperor's voice banished all warmth from the already frigid Senatorium. It was as if a corpse had sat up in the middle of its own funeral, shedding twigs and cinders as its pyre disintegrated and its clothes and hair kindled, and spoken. The sense of _wrongness_ flowing from the bent and ravaged figure on the throne was total, a nauseating tide that tugged at Luke's guts and filled his mouth with a sour, metallic taste. How could _this_ be the Emperor? How could the galaxy have let it happen?

Tarkin spoke, his dry, aristocratic tone at least recognizable as human speech. "The Council of Moffs brings a motion before the Throne."

"The Throne will hear the Council's motion." Again, the creeping dread, the sweats and shakes. The Emperor's eyes were like pits.

"The Council moves that the zone of quarantined space surrounding Serenno be expanded to the ninety-ninth remove within the quadrant and that the duration of said zone be extended to accommodate the fleet's continued efforts to contain the debris and unexploded munitions still in orbit around the afflicted planet."

Luke had no idea what any of it meant, but he saw the anger and frustration on the faces of the Senate's few alien representatives. An emaciated Neimoidian went so far as to bury her face in her hands while the Gossam delegation conferred furiously among themselves. In Serenno's box, Amaldis Dooku dropped into her seat with a look of utter despair on her face. An estranged second cousin to the Confederacy's butchered leader, Bail often complimented her willingness to remain in the Senate and suffer the Emperor's cruel mockery of her position in order to lobby fruitlessly on behalf of her exiled and unhomed people.

Palpatine's chamberlain, a tall, slender woman in an insectile headpiece and long cream-and-purple robes, made a note on her ornate datapad. "The motion is before the Senate."

"Kuat seconds the motion," said a spidery, dark-haired man Luke didn't recognize.

"Motion is seconded," the Chamberlain trilled. "All those in favor, say "Aye." Those opposed, "Nay.""

Amaldis Dooku stood, composing herself. Blunt-featured and greying, she nonetheless commanded a measure of her cousin's legendary gravitas. The eyes of the Senate settled on her hooded eyes and bowed shoulders. "Serenno lodges a formal complaint against this motion. It is inhumane, without precedent, and a death sentence for the Serennese refugees struggling for survival in the ports and ghettos of the Outer Rim."

A moment of silence followed. Luke almost dared to believe that someone would speak out on Amaldis's behalf, but then hands rose like a forest and shouts of "aye" filled the echoing dark. Amaldis resumed her seat with steely dignity, defeated.

"Serenno's complaint is noted," the Chamberlain said. She looked back down at the datapad's screen. "The ayes have it. Motion carries."

A frenzy of voices rose to fill the silence, the senators of a thousand, thousand worlds begging for the floor, but the Emperor ignored them. The curtains of his floating throne drifted shut as though blown by a lazy wind. The glow-lances bristling from its canopy winked out one by one as the entire massive contrivance began to ascend toward the blackness above. _Does he live up there?_ Luke wondered, craning his neck back and squinting until his eyes watered. He could make out nothing of the distant ceiling.

"Come along, Luke," said Bail.

"What?" Luke tore his attention from the ascending throne. "That's all?"

Bail chuckled ruefully as they left the box, C-3PO trailing behind them with small, officious steps. "He'll make the Senate wait until tomorrow to resume proceedings, or he'll call us in the middle of the night; it's how he keeps us in line."

Luke looked across the Senatorium at Amaldis, lingering in her box, knuckles white on the rail. A deep unease settled in his stomach. "What happened to Serenno, Dad?"

Bail's expression darkened. "The war. Don't dawdle, Luke."

* * *

They streamed back into the Processional in a silent throng of black and grey. It seemed to Luke as though everyone but the Moffs was angry over the result of the session and its sudden termination, but something in the air kept people quiet. Luke felt it, too. A prickle on the back of his neck and the itching, ugly thought that no sooner had the Emperor left the Senate's sight then he had crawled into some vent or hidden place to peer down on his shivering subjects, an oversized insect gloating over its laden web.

A wail broke Luke's unpleasant daydream. The hall was deathly still around him and his father's hand was on his shoulder, fingers digging in. Ahead, two Guards had backed the Ithorian senator against a wall. One held the leash of a massif straining to get free. The other had his force pike's built-in blaster leveled at the groaning alien. Behind the Ithorian the wall went up and up forever, a black expanse of stone as dark as the void outside the porthole of Luke's stateroom on the _Tantive IV._ The massif barked and whined, drool hanging in ropes from its panting jaws. The Ithorian's wide-set eyes rolled in terror.

"Dad, we've got to help him," Luke whispered.

"Be silent, Luke." Bail's grip on his shoulder was like iron. "Listen to what I told you."

The Guard holding the massif's leash signed something with his free hand. The other Guard nodded thoughtfully, then lowered the heavy blaster's barrel. A wave of palpable relief spread through the hall as the Ithorian's shoulders sagged and a vague murmur of conversation rose up to fill the suffocating silence. Luke caught the Ithorian's eye and gave the alien a tentative smile. The Ithorian's eyes crinkled at the corners in rueful humor.

And then the Guard shot the senator of Ithor through the knee. Howling, the Ithorian fell just as the other Guard released the massif. Claws scrabbled on stone. Screams rippled out through the crowd as senators and staff scrambled away from the scene of carnage, from the horrible sight of the Ithorian's flesh _stretching_ in the massif's jaws as the beast's thick neck rippled and shivered, and then finally one of the flailing alien's throats tore free of his body in a spray of gore. Luke heard himself scream as though from a long way off. He wanted to run, to turn away, but his father's hand held him in place and his eyes seemed glued to the spectacle of the massif's gory snout plunging into the wound it had made.

The Guards looked down in silence at body twitching on the floor, at the beast that feasted on the Ithorian's flesh, the blood invisible against their robes.

"That's the enemy, Luke." Bail spoke in a voice so low that only Luke could hear him. "Never forget it."

MARA

The taste of dirty water woke Mara from uneasy dreams. Spluttering, she kicked free of her cot's thin sheet and tore the source of the foul taste, a sodden rag bearing the stains of decades of floors scrubbed, off of her face. She gagged and spat phlegm and filthy liquid as she tumbled to the warped dormitory floorboards, gasping in pain when her still-healing hand slapped against the hardwood.

"Happy name day, wormskin," said Tarul. The Nikto girl loomed over Mara, her henchmen to her either side. Tarul squatted and retrieved the rag. "Did you just throw away my present?"

Mara spat again to clear her throat, then pushed herself up onto her elbows. It was still dark outside. Moonlight fell across the floor between the narrow cots where the orphans of Indru House slept. "I've seen you eat trash before," she snarled. "Is that why you stuffed that thing into my mouth? Did you think I was hungry?"

The Nikto's rough, pebbly lips twisted into a scowl. "Wrong answer."

Mara's desperate roll into the cover of her cot was doomed from the start. Indon and Bizo, Tarul's twin Rodian lieutenants, jumped past their taskmaster to haul Mara out from under the bed and pin her to the ground as Tarul leaned forward, pinched her nostrils shut, and then forced the rag into her mouth when suffocation forced it open. The thick, astringent taste of piss and floor wax flooded Mara's tongue. Tears of shame burned at the corners of her eyes.

"Spit it out and I'll break your other hand," the Nikto hissed in Mara's ear. She straightened up, hard black eyes raking the dormitory as the other children did their best to pretend at sleep. "Let's take her outside, boys. That old rag isn't enough to clean a dirty wormskin like our Mara."

The twins piped their mirth, their sticky fingers adhering to Mara's skin as they dragged her to her feet and toward the dormitory door. She broke a toenail on a loose board when Tarul pushed her from behind. The pain made dark spots bloom, but she forced herself to pick up her pace. Her left hand ached and throbbed as Indon tightened his grip on her arm; the bones hadn't been set after what Mother Deren had done to her when she'd been caught filching from the kitchens. _You were too slow,_ she berated herself as Bizo boxed her ear, making it ring. _You're always too slow. You see it coming and you just stare. Stupid, stupid, stupid._

Mother Deren herself, matron of the orphanage and nominal steward of its inmates, was coming up the stairs with a bottle of Corellian brandy under one arm and an unlit deathstick in her mouth when Tarul and her cronies manhandled Mara out onto the third-story landing. The pinched old stick of a Twi'lek, haglike as ever in her tatty floral night robe, paused, looking up the staircase at Mara with the cloth stuffed into her mouth and her arms pinioned behind her back by Indon and Bizo. For a moment, Mara dared to hope that the matron would intervene, that whatever shred of decency lurked in the old Twi'lek's breast would at least transmute this torture into a punishment for the four of them for being out of bounds after hours.

"We caught her stealing again, Mother Deren," Tarul offered sweetly, proffering a palm-sized tin of brined crustaceans. "She was hiding food under a loose floorboard. We didn't want to bother you, so we were taking her down to the kitchens to put it back."

Mother Deren said nothing, but the look she gave Mara couldn't fail to communicate how little the Twi'lek cared about the truth of Tarul's accusations. A bitter smile hoisted the old woman's lips as she resumed her ascent, each step creaking under her slippered tread. _How can she decide what happens to me?_ Mara thought, staring at the matron in transfixed revulsion. _Who put her in charge of whether I live or die?_

"I want you back in bed before the breakfast bell," Mother Deren said as she climbed past them, trudging up toward her office and apartments on the fifth floor. A moment more and she was gone. Mara sobbed into her makeshift gag as Tarul grabbed a fistful of her hair.

"Guess she's still mad about last week, huh?" the Nikto simpered. She grinned, displaying needle-sharp teeth. "That means I can do whatever I want."

They dragged her down the rickety stairs, out past the sleeping Zabrak watchman at the desk and into the frigid morning air. Grey dawn tinged the sky over the peninsula, the rocky spit of land where Indru House sat rotting and staring out at the sea. At the sight of the whitecaps breaking on the stony shore, Mara thought for a moment that Tarul meant to drown her in the surf, but instead the older girl led her accomplices around the ramshackle orphanage to where the rusty outdoor 'fresher stood, the one the staff used to sterilize the nurse's equipment and to hose down produce. The stall was scarcely bigger than a coffin, its interior reeking of mildew and cleaning solution even from fifteen yards away.

The thought of being forced into that fetid tomb made Mara wild. Her heart thundered as the slab of shadows beyond the 'fresher door swelled with her approach. She fought. She drew her legs up and flung her weight against the twins, twisting madly, shrieking through the gag in her mouth, but the Rodians kept their grips and Tarul seized her ankles and hauled her onward toward the waiting darkness.

"All you wormskins always stink," laughed Tarul. "I'm doing you a favor."

The twins bundled Mara into the 'fresher, throwing her down onto the hard duracrete, and Tarul slammed the door before she could make another bid for freedom. Mara's labored breathing echoed from the walls. She couldn't see an inch; no light remained. _No,_ was all her brain could conjure as she spat out Tarul's putrid gag and beat her fists against the plasteel door, held from outside by a lock or else by the twins. Sharp pain in her left hand rewarded her as unhealed bones ground together and jumped out of what tenuous joint they'd achieved. She wailed, the sound low and ugly in the confined space, and threw her shoulder against the door. "Please, Tarul!" she screamed.

Cuts, burns, beatings, and the thousand other indignities of life at Indru House held no fear for Mara. She didn't dream of drowning, of falling, of womp rats or acklay spawn gnawing at her heels. The horror holos that set the other children shivering in their cots always left her cold and unaffected, an adult at a puppet show for toddlers. It was the dark that scared Mara Jade.

Hot water blasted from the 'fresher's unseen jets. Mara screamed again, scrambling away from the stream just as the other nozzles began fitfully to fire. Scalding waves pulsed over her body, battering her to the floor, squeezing the breath from her lungs. The weight of it kept her flattened, steam swirling around her, Tarul shouting something indecipherable through the cataclysmic sound of the water. And then it stopped. Mara, ears ringing, skin raw, lay curled into a spluttering, wheezing ball on the 'fresher's duracrete floor. Hot water sluiced around her, draining slowly.

Tarul's voice sounded thin through the door. "Had enough, worm?"

"Yes," Mara sobbed. "Please. I'll do anything, Tarul. I'll...I'll do what you asked me, about your parents —"

She knew she'd made a mistake as soon as the words were out of her mouth. The other children hated Mara, but they knew to listen to her hunches, and they knew her dreams came true. Sometimes they'd come to her alone to ask for things, to beg her to read their futures, for help with getting chosen by the families that came infrequently to inspect Mother Deren's flock. Tarul, alternating every other word with threats, had asked Mara to find her parents.

 _They wouldn't leave me here if they knew I was alive,_ she'd said, and underneath the snarl had been an ocean of misery and calcifying loneliness. Mara had refused her out of spite, not that she knew how to do what Tarul asked anyway, and lost a tooth for it. Now the 'fresher rattled back to life at Tarul's command. The other girl was swearing, her voice thick. "You lying scum," she choked. "You dirty wormskin bastard! Nobody wants you! Nobody'll ever want you!"

The sound of claws on the control pad. The 'fresher rattled back to life, the water this time bitterly cold. Mara let the 'fresher's current shove her into its farthest corner, buffeting her body back against the unyielding wall. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't see. She wrapped her arms around her head and hunkered down as best she could, heels sliding on the slick duracrete, her skin slowly going numb under the relentless tumult.

* * *

It was hard to say when it ended. Her ears were still ringing. Her breath felt loose and ragged. Her fingers and toes were hot and swollen, her lips bloody where she'd bitten herself, her face, back, and front dull and tingling. When the door opened she could hardly stand. Three halting steps delivered her into the arms of the morning. The sun was bloody on the horizon, a wound in the sky, and its light danced on the waves. It took a moment for Mara's brain to register that there was no sign of Tarul or the twins.

In their place stood a tall, powerful figure robed and helmed in red. In their arms, neatly folded, were a dark smock and leggings, cleaner and finer than anything Mara had ever worn. The figure held them out, stepping forward to loom over her with silent deference, and she accepted them in numbed silence, marveling at how good they felt against her brutalized skin. Unthinking, she stripped off her torn and sodden nightgown and dressed herself in the red stranger's proffered gifts. It all fit perfectly, snug and warm as a glove.

"Thank you," she said. It was all she could think of to say.

The red-robed figure nodded, then extended a gloved hand. Mara took it.

"Who are you?" she asked the apparition.

They only led her on around the south wing of Inru House, their footsteps loud in the dawn hush, to where a sleek, predatory shuttle with wings folded up like a hawkbat's and a tremendous dorsal fin sat waiting on the heath, its landing gear giving it the appearance of an oversized beetle. Mother Deren, whom Mara had never seen leave Inru House in all her years beneath its rotting roof, stood outside with two more of the red-robed figures and a handsome man in a crisp black uniform with some sort of insignia on his chest. Blue and red squares, like the Imperial officers in action holos.

"You'll find that everything is in order," said the handsome officer. "There will be no further delays, matron, nor another attempt to extort financial favors from Imperial personnel."

Mother Deren's cheeks flamed. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean!" she spat. She caught sight of Mara approaching with her towering escort and her bony hand leapt up to point in accusation. "It's not extortion, is it? Asking for a poor pittance after I've broken my back for this one? Kept her on long past her endowment's bankruptcy! Treated her like she was my own—"

"It's intact," said the officer. He looked impatient now. Impatient, and angry. "And please, don't dishonor yourself further with claims of love and loyalty when you've made your fortune on the backs of that girl and those like her. Why anyone saw fit to leave children in your care is beyond me, madam."

Mother Deren was speechless. Her mouth hung open. Mara, looking on, felt an impossible surge of joy, a buoyancy so tremendous that the gloom inside the shuttle didn't even bother her as her escort led her toward it. She laughed as the shadows swallowed her, pressing her broken fist against her mouth and giggling at the sight of the old woman standing flabbergasted in her housecoat in the shadow of the orphanage.

* * *

"Do you know why I've brought you here, child?"

The old man sat on a window seat in the star destroyer's stateroom, the void at his back. He wore a grey robe and beneath its cowl his face was a ravaged landscape of wrinkles and scars, his skin a jaundiced yellow-green, his eyes like carious pits. His teeth were rotten.

The great ship had looked so small at first during the shuttle's ascent through the atmosphere. An arrowhead silhouetted against the moon. On approach, it had swollen until it eclipsed the stars behind it. "To meet you, m'lord," Mara said, digging her toes into the soft carpet.

"Yes," the old man said. His smile was putrid, though she thought he meant for it to comfort her. "Do you know who I am?"

"No, m'lord," she said. "I'm 'shamed. I'm sorry. Mother Deren didn't tell me."

"Mother Deren…" His voice was like a rusty hinge, his intonation at once mocking and understanding. "You hate her, don't you?"

Mara knew a test when she saw one. She looked the old man in the eye and quashed her first, impulsive response. _Every second of every day._ "No, m'lord."

He seemed almost disappointed, until a second smile broke across his hideous features. "Remarkable," he said. "Few people can lie to me, fewer still as well as you have. I'll ask again. Do you hate her?"

Mara felt the moment shatter. It was like that, sometimes. A broken mirror of possibilities branching off in all directions. She saw herself grown at this man's side, a blade-slim figure in a black bodyglove, a weapon in human form. She saw herself old and grey in a fetid jungle. Cradling a wailing baby. Dragged out of the old man's stateroom in a body bag in just a minute's time. She saw all that would be, and all that might. Shards of a hundred selves.

"I do hate her," she said, wetting her cracked lips.

"Yes," the old man said. "I can feel that you do. Would you like to see her die?"

Mara frowned. She flexed her half-healed hand, feeling bone grind against bone. When she spoke, her voice sounded small. "You can do that?"

His smile returned. A view of the orphanage on its lonely spit of land replaced the starfield at the old man's back. A holo-broadcast like the ones Mother Deren watched in her office, but crystal clear and in perfect color, the old woman herself still shivering out in front of her fortress. Mara thought she could see some of the other children watching from the windows. _She looks small,_ she thought coldly. _She looks small and old and stupid. Why did I let her close my hand in the door? I could have shoved her over. Could have broken_ her _hand._

"How will it happen?" The voice belonged to someone else. It must have.

The old man's sallow finger found the comlink built into the window seat. The hiss of transmission filled the stateroom. "Lieutenant Needa," he said in his stentorian croak. "Kill her."

On the screen, the tiny figure of the officer, his hand to his ear, nodded and then approached the red-robed sentinels standing guard over Mother Deren. He said something to them and Mara's heart began to thunder. The world narrowed to the screen, to the moving images behind the old man's cowled head. The red-robes turned as one and Mother Deren, her sense for trouble always sharp, fled, sprinting flat-out back toward Indru House with her robe hiked up around her knees. The taller of the two red-robes raised his force pike and flung it like a javelin. It caught the old Twi'lek between her shoulders and she spun like a dancer, her lekku flying, before collapsing to the dirt. The red-robe marched forward and retrieved his pike. He had to brace his boot against Mother Deren's back to wrench it free.

Mara stared at the screen, her breath coming fast and shallow.

He had moved behind her, somehow. His hands were on her shoulders. His rotten breath washed over her. "Would you like to see it again, child?"

"No," said Mara, staring at the matron's corpse. "Make them kill Tarul."


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO: THE WITCH'S HOUSE

LEIA

The first time she entered the witch's hut, she found it filthy. Grease and mold caked the stone counters. The cabinet doors were askew and weaver webs hung heavy from the ceilings. A curtain of carved wooden beads hid the back of the hut and a drooling anooba slept curled up by the grimy stove. Strips of poorly-cured eopie meat, already turning in the heat, hung from the ceiling alongside slovenly bundles of desert herbs and roots. Leia stood small and frightened in the doorway, wishing with all her heart to wake up from this nightmare and climb into bed with Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.

"I have work to do," said the witch. "You live here now. This is your home. Clean it, and don't stray from the hut." She turned her pale gaze on the anooba. "Ena, watch her."

The sleek, grey-coated beast yawned hugely and stretched itself like an enormous feline.

"I want to go home," said Leia. She was ashamed to hear the tremor in her voice. The anooba scared her; her uncle said they killed people, sometimes. Dragged them out of idling speeders and off into the dunes. "I want Aunt Beru."

"Do as I say," said the witch, pushing Leia firmly over the threshold and into the thick smells and drifting dust of the hut. "And don't ask questions, girl."

Leia swallowed past the lump in her throat as the hut's heavy moisture lock slammed shut behind her, leaving her alone with the anooba. The rangy beast lay as it had when she'd entered, sprawled on its side and panting in the heat, but now its left ear was cocked and its bright blue eye was trained on her unerringly while its long, stiff tail swept dust back and forth in lazy waves across the floor. The single glow lamp hanging from the domed ceiling cast strange shadows on the walls.

Leia wanted to curl up on the dirty pallet in the corner and cry herself to sleep, but the thought of what the witch might do to her if she disobeyed was goad enough to drive her, sniffling and red-eyed, to the rough-handled broom standing in the corner. She had to swipe away the layers of weaver webs that anchored the broom to the hut's mud-and-duracrete wall and fouled its straw head. It was too tall for her, really, but at least by sleeping she could devote her attention to something other than her nightmarish day and the ache in the pit of her stomach. The thought that her aunt and uncle had sold her into slavery dogged her as she battled with the drifts of dust and hair surrounding every one of the hut's splintery, ancient pieces of furniture.

It must have been my fault, she thought. I cost too much to feed, or something. I could...I could go back, offer to eat less, to rent out my room to a boarder and sleep in the speeder.

The morning wore on as a small mound of rubbish accumulated in the center of the hut, fruit of Leia's expeditions into disused corners and under the witch's low table and cloth-seated chairs. Sweating bullets in the growing heat, she tied her hair back with a strip of ratty black cloth she found in one of the witch's cabinets. The anooba watched her efforts with amusement, its pink tongue lolling as she wiped dust off a scrimshawed bantha horn, turning it in her hands to admire the mesmerizing patterns carved into the bone.

She ignored the beast for as long as she could, standing on chairs to swipe weaver webs off of the ceiling, scouring the cramped 'fresher with fistfuls of sand and rags moistened by her own spit, and doing her best not to breathe through her nose as she scraped mold and muck off the crockery piled a meter high in the witch's washbasin. But in the end, with the shadows lengthening outside, there was nowhere left to tackle but the stove, its environs, and the dozing anooba. That and whatever lay behind the beaded curtain, but a little voice in Leia's head told her to avoid anything the witch considered private. Who knew what horrors lurked behind that rippling wall of beads and bone? Better to take her chances with the monster than to risk black magic.

Leia approached the anooba where it lay, gripping the broom tight against her body like a warding totem. "I...I need to get behind you," Leia stammered. She felt foolish talking to the beast like it could hear her, but to her surprise it stretched again, baring its long teeth in a monstrous grin, and then rose and padded to the moisture lock where it slipped through a smaller portal hidden by a heavy leather flap. Its tail swished back and forth, dwindling, and then it was gone. The weighed flap fell back into place, cutting off the sunlight's momentary radiance.

Leia stood alone in the sweltering hut, her knuckles white on the broom's handle. When the anooba didn't return, she released her breath and returned to sweeping. Her arms burned with the effort, and the moisture lock was almost too heavy to shift when it came time to sweep the rubbish she'd collected out into the dusty haze of early evening. She squinted up at the setting suns for a moment, scanning the mesa nervously from the moisture lock's threshold, and then darted back inside and hauled the door closed after her. Even swept, the hut remained sticky and unpleasant, its caked-on mess the result of years of disorder. Aunt Beru would never have stood for it. She was always cleaning.

The lump in Leia's throat swelled when she thought about her aunt, so she banished her memories and went to wrestle a sealed tub of fifth water out from underneath the stove. Already used to cook, bathe, and launder clothes, the precious fluid was grey and cloudy, unusable for anything but scrubbing. Leia pulled the wooden lid off and stared down into the rippling interior, her own sweaty face reflected there imperfectly. She tipped it over. Water sluiced over the floor, the drain at the center of the room gurgling as it drank the fifth into the hut's cisterns where it would be filtered through charcoal, mineral sieves, and a dozen other layers of sundry materials. Leia's friend Wedge had laid it all out for her when Uncle Owen had last taken her to Tosche Station where Wedge's mother was a flight control dispatcher. Wedge had told her in confidence that day that he wanted to be a TIE pilot, the best and bravest in the Imperial Fleet.

She bent her back into pushing the witch's handbrush through the accumulated filth on the floor, leaving a clean streak in her wake. She paused at intervals to slosh new water out as she scrubbed her way across the room, head down and arms trembling. She had a sense, mostly from Aunt Beru's unease around the Stormtroopers in Mos Espa and the way Uncle Owen grumbled and banged around the farmstead whenever the Imperial News came on the holoband in the evening, that there was something bad about the Empire. "You mark my words," Uncle Owen said sometimes, late at night when they thought Leia was asleep. "It'll be like last time. People are afraid, Beru. Only a matter of time before they get angry."

Leia had only nodded when Wedge shared his dream of flying out among the stars, but the pain in her uncle's voice when he said "like last time," the box of photographs he wouldn't show her but which she'd seen anyway, pictures of an aging man in a repulsor chair, his legs bandaged stubs, of a handsome, careworn woman standing outside the Lars farmstead, the same man at her side, his legs intact, a smile on his bearded face, told her something bad had happened. Something terrible.

She finished cleaning just as Tattoo II set bloody in the distance. There was no sign of the witch, or of her anooba. Urusai sang their croaking songs outside, circling back to their roosts in the cliffside. Leia stepped out through the moisture seal and let the cooling air dry the sweat on her skin. She was bone-tired, her back aching, her eyes strained from peering around into the hut's dark corners, and there was muck under her fingernails and grit worked into the knees of her leggings. The work was done. In its place there was a gnawing emptiness and the hot, choking rush of tears returning. She knuckled her eyes angrily, furious at herself.

"Don't be a baby," she muttered angrily.

How far had her uncle taken her? No more than a day, surely, and their speeder ride before they'd started walking hadn't been that long. If she just hiked back to the farmstead and told him what the witch was like, if she could beg her aunt to intercede for her…

Her lip stopped trembling. She wiped her face on her sleeve and scowled, red-eyed.

She'd made up her mind, and no one was going to stop Leia Skywalker now.

* * *

Leia slipped out of the hut a scant few minutes later, her only supplies a pair of water gourds knotted to her belt, a rusty glow lamp, and a small satchel packed with stale flatbread and a few strips of not-too-rancid meat. The first step out into the dark was the hardest. The mesa swallowed the glow lamp's flickering beam. The sound of her footsteps was lost in the moaning of the wind. Doubt scratched at the back of her mind. It's too far. You're too little. You'll never make it to the farm, and if she catches you…

She swallowed, hunched her shoulders, and moved on. There was no point second-guessing herself now. She only wished she hadn't wasted so much energy scrubbing the floor before she'd decided to leave. It'll be okay once I get home, she thought. I can sleep out in the droid pool and explain everything in the morning.

The canyon mouth loomed before her, its jagged walls darker ramparts against the soft black sky. The moons were new tonight, the night deep and cold. Leia's pace faltered at the sight of that narrow throat of stone with its sandy footpath winding far, far back down to the flats and dunes that separated the Jundland Wastes from the outskirts of Mos Espa where the Lars farmstead had stood for thirteen stubborn generations. The anooba could be waiting in there, her thoughts hissed. You'd never see it coming.

Rocks shifted somewhere near the canyon's lip. Leia froze a few dozen meters from the darkness of the mouth, her heart pounding in her chest as something vast and simian detached itself from the gloom atop the canyon wall. Hooked claws stretched down on long, knotted arms; horny knuckles took the weight of a colossal body. Ropes of yellowish saliva dripped from a snaggletoothed jaw beneath a brute's heavy brow and high, batlike nostrils set flush between small yellowish eyes. Its tread shook the mesa beneath Leia's feet. Its hothouse stench was equal parts meat-rot and wildflowers. It shambled closer, emerging from the shadows like a nightmare given form. A rancor.

Leia couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. She could feel a scream welling up from somewhere deep and dark within her. A dry, thin hand clamped fast over her mouth just as she began to wail.

"I told you not to stray," said the witch. Her voice was thin and angry. "Go back to the house. Now."

The rancor roared, swinging its huge head so that drool sprayed over the sand. The sound silenced the desert, a shrieking crash like thunder shattering a roomful of glass. Its jaws snapped together with horrible finality as it knuckled its way forward, coming toward Leia and the witch. Its deep, puffing exhalations wafted the smell of carrion toward them.

"Go!" the witch repeated, shoving Leia back toward the distant light of the hut's open door. Leia dropped her lamp and ran, certain with every jarring step that the rancor would snatch her up from the hardpan and dash her body against the rocks, that its jaws would break her like a toothpick. She stumbled over a profogg hole, fell, and scrambled onward, forcing herself back up to her feet. Her senses sang, and all at once the night no longer seemed so dark. The air that moved over her skin seemed to guide her steps. The echo of her ragged breathing made a picture of the world around her in her mind. She ran on seamlessly, vaulting rocky outcroppings and dodging ruts and pitfalls. She didn't stumble until her foot hit the threshold of the hut. Two toenails split wide open and she fell sprawling through the moisture lock to roll across the floor.

She looked back, dreading the specter of the monster pushing itself up against the doorway, shoving one of those long, ropy arms into the hut to drag her out and do to her whatever it had first done to the witch.

There was nothing. The doorway was empty, the desert beyond it silent and dark. Leia let herself cry, let sobs of terror shake her body as she crawled to the pallet in the corner and curled up beneath its ragged Tusken quilt, not caring that her foot had led a trail of blood across the floor she'd labored to clean. Her throat felt tight and achey. Minutes ticked by. Terror faded into grief, and then into a bottomless exhaustion.

Leia fell into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

When the hut's cramped interior swam back into view, the witch was emerging from behind her beaded curtain. Leia caught a momentary glimpse of two metal cylinders hanging from the wall, of a threadbare hammock and teetering heaps of rubbish and old, decaying books, and then the curtains swung shut with a gentle clatter like rain falling on stones. The witch turned to look at her, the planes of her face dark and indistinct. The glow lamp's light had faded to a soft orange point and the hut was deep in shadow.

Leia cringed back against the wall as the witch approached. The woman did not strike her, though. She sat down on the edge of Leia's pallet. "Kaliri would have killed you," she said.

"The rancor?" Leia asked, sleep thickening her voice.

"You were a fool to try the desert at night," said the witch. "Until Kaliri knows you, stay clear of the canyon. And even then, you have much to learn before you can return to your family. That is the way of things. That is the price."

"The price of the Force and its mysteries," the woman said, and in those words Leia heard a loss as deep and painful as her uncle's, a washed-out record of some tragedy beyond imagining. "The price to walk the path of the Jedi, like your father before you."

Leia's eyes flew wide open. "You knew my father?"

The witch's smile was catlike. "I knew him. Work hard, child, and someday you could be as great as he."

_Twelve years later..._

LUKE

The deck shuddered beneath his feet. The _Tantive IV,_ his ship, his father's ship, was under attack. Doomed, truth be told, because her hyperdrive was blown and there was no chance of the old girl outrunning the star destroyer chasing her through Tatooine's scant exosphere. Luke Organa, junior senator for Alderaan and heir to its throne, ran through the dying _Tantive_ with his bodyguards in tow, working back through the ship's sparking, dimly-lit midsection, past crew and droids laboring to halt the cascading system failures quickly transforming the _Tantive IV_ into an extremely expensive brick and into the cramped and smoke-filled passageways engineering. C-3PO and the captain's squat, irascible astromech, R2-D2, followed gamely in their wake.

The head of Luke's personal guard called for the halt outside the escape pod hub. Within, circular airlocks had already cycled open on the cramped interiors of two dozen short-range subspace pods. "You're leaving, Highness," the old soldier stated gruffly. "At this range, that star destroyer can't hope to take out our full complement of escape pods. Any closer and her point defense cannons will rip right through the pods on their way past."

"I'm not abandoning my ship," Luke countered. "Lieutenant Salomon, the crew needs me. I can't run. I won't."

"I swore an oath to your mother," said Salomon. The big man thrust his bearded jaw toward Luke. "I don't intend to betray my queen, Prince Luke, and the Rebellion needs you more than this crew does. So you're going to get in a Sith-spawned pod before I have to toss you in myself."

The _Tantive_ shuddered again, fresh jets of coolant bursting from ruptured panels along the nearest bulkhead. The boarding alarm began to blare.

"Oh, heavens!" C-3PO fretted, waving his gilded arms. "We're doomed!"

R2 blatted something uncomplimentary; Luke's binary was a little shaky.

"I don't have time for this," Salomon growled to himself. He unlimbered his blaster rifle with practiced ease and shoved Luke toward the pods. "Get off this ship, or I swear by my grandmother's grave I'll tan your hide six colors, boy." Turning, he charged back down the passageway.

"Go with him," Luke urged the two nervous-looking security recruits Salomon had ignored in his headlong flight. "I'm leaving. I'm leaving!"

The two men hesitated, glancing at each other and at Luke as the alarm continued to wail. One frowned, half-turned away toward the sound of something whining against durasteel. A mechanical fault, unless it was a boarding saw. "Lieutenant said—"

"I know what he said," Luke placated. "I'm going. I'm gone. Just get up there with him before he gets himself killed!"

The men took off, one chancing a frantic glance over his shoulder before he vanished around a turn. Luke drew his target blaster, a long-barreled model his mother had given him for his eighteenth name day over Bail's objections, and stepped into the pod bay. R2 followed him, C-3PO tottering along behind the little droid. "Oh, dear," the protocol droid stammered. "Oh dear, oh dear. However will we survive?"

Luke stopped in front of the entrance to the sixth pod on the cabin's port side. He tapped his command code into the control panel outside the pod, priming it for launch. "Come here, R2," he said, finishing his preparations and kneeling on the cold deck. The little astromech rolled up to him and emitted a series of interrogative beeps and whistles, rocking from side to side in agitation. "Take it easy. I've got a job for you. An important one."

It occurred to Luke, as he reached inside his jacket for the data spike containing the plans so many of his allies had fought and died for, that he had no idea how old the R2 unit really was. For as long as he could remember it had been a fixture of his father's household, a cantankerous fireplug of a droid with carbon scoring around its ports and indelible rust buildup on its chassis. Now he was about to entrust it with the key to the Empire's undoing, the fruit of years of work by saboteurs, defectors, and spies. Carefully, he opened one of R2's dataports and slotted the spike into place. "There," he said. "Now you know how to build a superlaser. Don't go blabbing it around."

The droid emitted a sound suspiciously like a toddler blowing a raspberry.

Luke chuckled. "I know, it's tempting. Listen—"

Blaster fire echoed down the passageway, crystal clear and unrelenting.

"Oh dear," C-3PO whispered. "Master Luke, oughtn't we depart?"

Luke pushed thoughts of Lieutenant Salomon, Captain Antilles, and everyone else aboard, people he'd known for years, for his whole life, out of his mind. His hands trembled as he searched for R2's holo-recorder unit. "I'm not going anywhere, 3PO," he forced himself to say. "The two of you are getting in this pod and going to meet someone planetside, an old friend of my father's. I just...just need to record a quick message for him."

The blaster fire was coming nearer, mingled now with screams. Luke shut his eyes and tried to breathe as R2's recorder whirred to life.

"General Kenobi," he began. "Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars…"

DARTH VADER

The hiss of his respirator filled the airlock. The wheezing growl as his suit's oxygen scrubbers dumped tainted air through vents concealed by armor plates. The last of the Jedi watched his men die in the corvette's docking passage, watched them scuttle white-clad over the bodies of their dead like carrion beetles swarming over meat. Tibanna gas scorched the air. Blood smoked on the cold deck. He gave them a moment longer to secure their footing in the passageway, feeling with his ragged senses the extinguishment of little lives, candles snuffed out one by one, and then he entered.

The passage seethed with rebels. Their blasters spat and coughed, lacing the air with light as they traded fire with the Stormtroopers of the 501st. Vader's men made way for their commander, for the black-clad ghost of Anakin Skywalker. The rebels redoubled their efforts, though some fled at the sight of him. He let them run. Broken men and women were no threat to him. They could be herded together and shot out an airlock once the plans were safely back in the hands of the Empire. It was the warriors to whom he gave the gift of his attention.

He caught them in his grasp and crushed their throats like fruit. He lifted them up and broke their bodies against the bulkheads, painting the corvette's halls with blood. His soldiers surged forward around him, silent and deadly, pumping blaster bolts into the fallen to weed out pretenders. Vader knew the dead were dead, but he allowed the violence to continue. It felt good to break things, to reach out with the frail and thunderous arms of his power, maimed and never to heal, and bring reflections of them into the world. Variations on a theme of carnage.

An old man charged him from an adjoining hall. Bearded and grizzled, the veteran swung his stun baton like a mace as he crashed into Vader's side and drove him back across the bloody deck. _Good,_ thought Vader, seizing the stun baton in his hand and snapping it in half. _Come and die. Come and die. COME AND DIE._

He gestured and the man rose up kicking and spitting from the deck. "I know who you are!" he bellowed as his arms spread themselves at Vader's direction, the tendons in his elbows creaking. "I know who's in there, you coward! You kinslayer! I was at the temple that night! I—"

The man's neck broke with a sharp report. Vader let him fall and stepped over the soldier's corpse without a moment's hesitation. "The temple," he breathed, almost to himself, as his men boiled out through the ship's corridors. Blaster fire spreading like an illness. The Dark Lord standing alone in the hall.

* * *

The ship's captain, a bluff, balding man by the name of Antilles, stood sweating in Vader's shadow an hour after the rebels surrendered. The man did his best to contain his emotions, to curtail his fear, but his thoughts were a bag of mad vrelts and the Stormtroopers and warrant officers seething over the bridge weren't doing much to calm his nerves. Behind him, the ship's central computer smoked and spat out clouds of sparks from its ruined internal circuitry. Someone had purged the processors before taking a plasma torch to the mainframe, reducing the _Tantive_ 's systems to life support, emergency lighting, and not much else. All logs and data had been erased, but Vader smelled the lie in it. The plans were elsewhere, and his frustration was mounting.

"I have asked you a question, Captain Antilles." Vader laid a gloved hand on the man's quaking shoulder. "Do not make me repeat myself."

"I don't know anything about these...these plans," Antilles stammered.

Vader seized the captain's neck. Antilles left the deck as Vader raised him high, the servos in his arm protesting at the strain, Antilles' face reddening as he clawed at Vader's gauntleted wrist. "The plans stolen from the base on Serenno," he said, speaking inches from the captain's darkening face. "The plans beamed to this vessel by rebel agents operating groundside. The plans your pitiful resistance has staked its very existence on."

The man fought to swallow, his boots swinging just above the deck. "You...you can't do this." He broke a nail on Vader's armor, leaving a bright streak of blood behind where his hands had scrabbled for purchase.

The broken forge in Vader's heart was smoldering. Heat raged in him, a pounding anger that drove in like drills at his temples. The Force screamed and writhed in his grasp as he drove his will against the captain's. "Time is running out"

"We're on a...diplomatic mission," the man wheezed. "Medical...supplies...please…"

"If this is a diplomatic vessel," Vader snarled, tightening his grip, "then where is the ambassador?"

Something popped in the captain's throat, a crumpling sensation, wet and stiff. His eyes rolled back to show their whites. His clawing hands slid limp from Vader's forearm. The nearest officers did their best to conceal their disgust, though the Stormtroopers of the 501st only nodded and paused a moment to acknowledge the death before returning to their survey of the bridge's ruined systems.

"Tear this ship apart until you've found those plans," Vader thundered, swinging back toward the soldiers assembled on the bridge and storming through their midst. "And bring me the passengers. I want them alive!"

He threw aside the captain's body. The dead man struck the bulkhead and slid down to lie slumped against it, head lolling at a sickening angle.

* * *

Darth Vader stared through the star destroyer's viewpoint at the dun-colored sphere of Tatooine. Blackness surrounded it. His interrogators were delivering a steady stream of nothing. The ship was empty, its systems wiped, its droids junked. There was no trace of the plans.

He was running out of time, his favor in the Emperor's court evaporating like morning dew on Tatooine. Tatooine, that hateful world below him where the ghosts of the Tuskens still wailed, where his mother still looked up at him, transfixed, within the coarse walls of the tent that had become her tomb. How he longed to summon the whole Rimward Fleet and reduce it to glass and ashes, burn its memory out of himself like cauterizing a wound. But somehow, even now when he had half the galaxy at his fingertips, it had reached out and snatched his victory away from him.

Two Stormtroopers arrived on the bridge of the star destroyer _Unconquerable_ , a slender youth of nineteen or twenty supported between them. The boy was sandy-haired and handsome, composed on the surface but twitching underneath. And strong with the Force. Untrained, as yet unawakened, but very strong indeed. Vader left off his contemplation of the dusty sphere.

"We found him in the pod bay, Lord Vader," said the taller of the two troopers. "He says he's the crown prince of Alderaan. He killed and wounded several of us before we managed to stun him, my lord."

"Signal gunnery," Vader ordered the stocky, grim-faced woman at the helm. "Tell them to shoot down any escape pods that appear on their sensors. No, tell them to shoot down anything that flies. Nothing reaches the surface."

The woman offered a salute. "Yes, sir, my lord." She turned her attention to her station.

Vader extended his senses toward the boy's mind. Ferocious, unrefined resistance met him. "Prince Luke," he said, impressed. "How kind of you to join us."

"Darth Vader," the boy sneered. He had a politician's composure, upright and disdainful. "I thought I recognized your foul stench."

"Careful, Highness," Vader infused his voice with the raw dross of the Dark Side. Many of the bridge crew flinched. Luke paled, but said nothing. "Your father isn't here to protect you."

The boy rallied, ignoring his Stormtrooper captors so thoroughly they might as well have been part of the bulkheads. "The _Tantive_ is a diplomatic ship. We're on a mission of peace from Alderaan, delivering medical supplies to the Outer—"

"You're not on any mercy mission, Highness." He pressed forward, towering over Alderaan's prince. "You are in possession of plans stolen from an Imperial facility. You will surrender them to me, and in exchange you will live long enough to see your planet stripped of its seats in the Senate, your cities placed under Imperial administration, your mother removed from her throne, and your palace razed from orbit."

"I am a member of the Imperial Senate on a duly-credentialed—"

"My lord, report from gunnery." The Lieutenant at the helm shot Vader a nervous, sidelong glance before continuing. "A single escape pod detached from the _Tantive IV_ during boarding; gunnery tracked its flight but elected not to fire, as they detected no life signs aboard."

The bridge viewscreen cracked with a sound like ice breaking. A jagged spiderweb of stress fractures spread slowly from the point where Vader's will had struck it. The last of the Jedi stood still as stone as the bridge held its breath. Even the Prince had fallen quiet, his eyes wide as he watched the cracks creep slowly across the plasteel screen. Vader's breath wheezed and sucked in the silence.

The failsafe shield slid into place with a groan of hydraulics. The moment passed.

"Send a platoon after that pod," Vader snapped. "Tell them to scour the desert until they recover the plans. Failure will not be tolerated." He flexed one gloved hand, still soaked with Antilles's blood. "And tell the gunnery chief to report to me, Lieutenant. At once."

The trooper before him straightened. "And Senator Organa, my lord?"

"He is part of the Rebel Alliance, and a traitor. Take him away."

Something about the boy compelled Vader to watch as his men dragged him away. Defiance, yes, and bravery, but such qualities were hardly unique among the enemies he'd faced and crushed. His strength in the Force was intriguing, but no more so than many others who had stepped into its waters and found Vader waiting for them in the depths. No, there was something else. Something that tugged at the scorched and broken remnants of the man within the black sarcophagus.

There was only one path. He would break the boy, and tear his answers from the wreckage.

BOBA FETT

Nineteen years passed in a blur of his father's face. How desperately he sought the dead man in his ailing copies. How in shell after shell he hunted for the war chants that his father taught him, for a teacher of the _Teras Kasi_ warrior katas he practiced as a boy. Clones were waiting for him on the nameless border world where _Slave I_ took him after the Battle of Serenno, after his father died a hero, or would have if the holonet hadn't been cordoned, the battle redacted from history for "security reasons." They were forgotten, a deep space sensor garrison of aging clones, most crippled in the war. Like standing in a hall of mirrors after an earthquake. They did what they could for the angry, desolate boy delivered to them from the stars. Speeder rides and sparring practice, target shooting, scrubbing floors, anything to tire him out, to keep the tears from flowing. Rough lullabies. Rocked to sleep in arms that one day would be his.

 _Slave I_ opened up its systems to him on his eighteenth birthday, eight years after his arrival on the nameless rock. He said he would return, promised it to the clones who saw him off, to the false fathers who had loved him and salved his wounds, but that was years ago. He thought of them often, but to return would be a death of sorts. The thought of aging on that lonely planet, of watching its green-gold sunset until his eyes failed, of hiking in its silent forests until his legs surrendered and his strength deserted him, was too much to bear. To die alone, in the dark. Like Jango.

Now, a killer in the solitary darkness of the void, he sought the artists, not the art. The work he did for petty crime lords and furtive Imperial governors, for rebel cells and Hutt kajidics, was a means to an end. The scalps he'd claimed only ticket to the boundless galaxy and the thousand secret bolt holes where his makers fled after the war. Clever of Kamino to anticipate betrayal, to sink their vast laboratories and vanish on swift ships into the trackless depths of Palpatine's empire. But too little, in the end. And too late. Their buried lives are just delaying the inevitable. Boba Fett never failed. He never gave up. He left no survivors.

Entombed in _Slave I_ 's cockpit like a king in his pyramid, he soared through the dark toward a world of light and shadow, a patchwork sphere rusting in the emptiness of space.

Toward Nar Shaddaa.

* * *

A tip had brought him to the city-moon, a tidbit from a drunken Ortolan warlord he served as retainer to on Concord Dawn through eight campaigns. The little tyrant had wanted a clone army, had fancied himself a grand general in the tradition of Windu and Kenobi, but Kamino had fallen. Its cloning tanks were at the bottom of its world-spanning ocean, its gene artisans scattered to the stars or herded together by their own creations and executed in Palpatine's purges.

 _I'll bet he loved that,_ Boba thought to himself as he moved from rooftop to rooftop through the refugee quarter near the Bas Uduna airfield where he'd docked _Slave I_. _Sending clones to kill the cloners._

The Ortolan, one Supreme Field Marshal Krodam Zez, spent millions of credits pursuing his baroque dreams of an army forged in a singular image. He dispatched messenger droids to hundreds of worlds, bought the services of private investigators all over a dozen sectors, and utterly neglected the beginning of the summer wars until three of his rivals invaded his island stronghold on the night Boba's contract expired. While the island's defenses crumbled, Zez regaled his trusted retainer with the tale of how his army, at last, was within his grasp, how his sources had unearthed rumors of cloners active in the Y'Toub system and his favorite pit fighter, a ravening beast of a Yuzzum whose name escaped Boba at present, would be the template for his victory not just on the islands of Concord Dawn but out among the stars. Boba had asked the madman several pointed questions about the rumor and its origins, and then he'd risen from the table. Out a window, up to the compound's landing pad, and then away from Concord Dawn and its small, unending wars. He had what he needed.

All around the bounty hunter, Nar Shaddaa spun through the daily drunken hysterics of its existence in the shadow of bloated, swampy Nal Hutta. The throne world of the Hutts bulked vast as one of the great slugs themselves in Nar Shaddaa's sky. Countless lanes and unruly swarms of airspeeder traffic threaded the unsteady spaces between the quarter's rusting towers as freighters came and went from docking pads ready to crumble into the abysses between market squares and tangled warehouse mega-blocks. The noise of so many engines was overwhelming, the stench of garbage and unwashed bodies doubly so. Updrafts brought the paper waste of a quarter of a trillion souls roaring up from the depths like flocks of hideous birds. Every alley overflowed with trash, a whole world's effluvium waiting for a collection that would never come.

And in the midst of it all, dug in like some hard-bodied parasitic insect, was a genuine Kaminoan cloner plying her trade among the cargo container shanty towns and decaying hab blocks. Boba Fett understood. Nar Shaddaa was a good place to disappear. As he paused in front of a towering neon advertisement for a local swoop circuit, the wind picked up. His cape billowed in the sudden gust as a swarm of mynocks detached themselves from nearby gutters and eaves to beat up skyward on glistening silicon wings. He watched them, their teeming throngs silhouetted against the setting sun, almost elegant in the way they schooled and flocked in mesmerizing patterns.

The bounty hunter tore himself away from the spectacle. If Zez's sources were right, he was getting close.

* * *

It would have been easy to miss her laboratory if he hadn't known where to look. A trail of couriers, junkyard proprietors, and biologists both amateur and professional-but-disgraced had led him to the unassuming hab block where, in the shadow of a bathhouse bristling with neon and armed with automatic tubes that launched fireworks every hour on the hour to the indefatigable fury of its neighbors, Nesun Bo had her workshop and apartments.

From a nearby rooftop he watched her eating noodles in her drab, dirty little kitchen. The eight-foot alien had to stoop to move about. She finished her solitary meal, washed the single bowl she'd used, and read for a time by the flickering light of the ceiling panels, timed to a building clock. Power ebbed and flowed on Nar Shaddaa; those without the money for their own generators had to make do. Nesun, though, despite her heavy sigh when the power cut out a few hours before midnight, had a second current wired to her apartment. Or, more precisely, to the vacant unit under it, what should have been the building's boiler room. When the lights went out, the face of the building falling dark like a giant's eye closing, the Kaminoan rose and returned her book to its shelf. She stood for a moment in the wan light falling through her window, and then she turned and vanished into the apartment's depths.

The bounty hunter waited another hour, then made his way across the shuddering bridges to the Kaminoan's hab block. It was a simple matter to wait for a salvo of fireworks from the bathhouse to vault the bridge rail and drop down to her window, breaking his fall with a short, sharp blast from his rocket pack. For a moment he clung to the crumbling duracrete wall, then he forced her window up and crawled into the darkened apartment. The muted colors of the fireworks filled the sky. Muddy red and washed-out blue bathing the cheap prefab furniture and sparsely-populated bookshelves of Nesun's living space. Even through his helmet's filter, he smelled mold and the earthy, acrid stink of vermin droppings.

* * *

The passage to her workshop took some finding. She'd concealed the narrow stairway behind a clever holo-panel programmed to resemble a thin slice of water-damaged wall. Boba had to shuck most of his armor to negotiate the gap, built to accommodate a Kaminoan's slender frame. He left his rocket pack, his cape, his boots, and a few other oddments in a neat stack near the window he'd come in through. The holo-panel swallowed him, crackling where it met his skin, and he slipped through it into darkness.

The laboratory was a duracrete-walled hyperrectangle crowded with what looked like years of research notes, scavenged computer equipment, and glasswork. The walls were hung with printed biomonitor readouts and other incomprehensible gobbledegook. Palm-sized holoprojectors maintained sputtering images of nerve clusters, grey matter, and joint architecture. The whole place stank of bacta with a whiff of some nutrient fluid he remembered from his childhood on Kamino.

And across the lab, opposite the stair where Boba crouched, concealed, was a cylindrical glass tank large enough to hold a grown man. No machinery occluded its walls; its terrible power was encoded in its glass, circuitry and systems nanometer thin and clear as purewater ice. Monitors to check the vitals of a growing clone. Subliminal recordings to instruct him in the chosen path his life would take. Calcium seep to make his skeleton dense, protein metamolecules to strengthen his muscles. A single tank like that cost more than a frigate to engineer and build, but the men who would emerge from it were a bent half-credit apiece.

The cloner was at a desk in the corner. Blue light from the tank bathed her narrow face and threw her lanky shadow long across the floor as she scribbled in a cheap black folio.

Bent over her desk, pen in hand, she didn't notice him as he straightened up and left the shelter of the staircase.

"Nesun," he said gently.

She turned toward the sound of his voice, rising and clutching the neck of her robe

closed with one long, pale hand. Her pen clattered to the floor. Her nostrils flared in fear. He knew his targets saw themselves reflected in the ionized blackness of his visor, knew she was seeing her own terror there right now. He kept it polished, just for that.

Boba Fett laid a hand on the hilt of his father's knife. "Time to answer for the men you killed," he said. "What's the number from the war bureau? Three billion clones dead before Vader finished off the CIS on Mustafar?" He moved toward her, stalking along the passage between towering stacks of printouts. "That's probably low."

"Boba Fett." Her voice cracked. "I was only a skeletal technician; I didn't even know what they were for, at first. What you were—they were—"

"Too late." He told her. He loosened the knife in its scabbard. "

"There's so much you don't know," she pled, her voice like music. "This goes deeper than either of us, Fett. Deeper than the Empire. Deeper than the Rebellion. I'm not just brewing organs for rich degenerates in here. This isn't about the past!"

"Is for me," he said.

Quick as a serpent, she drew a cheap holdout blaster from within her robe. He was across the room before she could fire, his shoulder driving hard into her belly. They went down together, crashing through piles of printed flimsyplast notes and diagrams, upending furniture and lab equipment that broke around them in showers of glass and hissing chemicals as they fought over the blaster. His helmet clipped the corner of a desk, and when his vision steadied he had the wrong elbow bent beneath his arm. Her gun hand was free, her holdout blaster pressed against his throat.

Nesun's dark eyes held nebulas of diffuse light. Dust limned in radiance and cast out into the void. He thought suddenly of Taun We, his father's physician and his occasional caretaker. He remembered being carried on her hip down a beautiful hall. He remembered her cool hand on his fevered forehead.

"Goodbye, Boba Fett."

The blaster misfired in a puff of diluted tibanna gas. Nesun's eyes widened.

"Hard luck," he said, and broke her arm.

* * *

The willowy Kaminoan fought him as he dragged her out onto the repulsor bridge that linked her hab to the teetering bath house across the crevasse. The night air pulled at them, carrying its complex bouquet of stenches as traffic whizzed past below and overhead in brilliant streams as passers-by made themselves scarce. Blood pulsing through the clogged and failing arteries of Nar Shaddaa. Below, between the threading lines of traffic, bridges and walkways spanned the dark like the spokes of a hundred different wheels all locked in differing positions. Nesun craned her long, elegant neck away from the sight. She was weeping, her one good fist beating at Boba's face and shoulders as she writhed and wailed.

"Please," she screamed. She drew the word out through her sob, hitching and shuddering. " _Pleee-eeee-eeeee-ease."_

He pulled his helmet off one-handed and let her see his face, scarred and sheened with sweat, and then he drew his knife and cut her throat in one smooth motion, slicing from beneath her chin down to her collarbone. Pale pink blood spilled out onto the street, pulsing past his hands in chlorine-smelling gouts.

"You've still got ten seconds," he told her as she clutched desperately at the gushing wound, pushing flaps of skin together with unsteady fingers. "Fifteen if you're a fighter. Make it that far and you might hit something."

She had a meter on him, but her bones were hollow, her frame easy to upend over the rusted safety rail. Her gory fingers scrabbled frantically at him, at air, at nothing at all and then she was tumbling down into the dark, robe flapping around her flailing frame. She turned end over end and struck a footbridge sixty meters down. She lay there, not moving. An old Kitonak bum sat playing her flute near where Nesun had fallen. The doughy alien didn't seem to have noticed; maybe she was blind, or deaf, or just plain tired.

Boba Fett had seen enough. He turned from the crevasse and its smells, pulling his helmet on again. The familiar stink of its leather padding was a comfort. Behind him, the bathhouse loosed another salvo of cheap pyrotechnics. Mostly duds, this time. Neon signs flashed and flickered. Ahead, the hab block towered. An unlit slab.

 _Deeper than the Empire,_ he reflected. _Deeper than the Rebellion. What were you hiding, Nesun? And just how deep does it go?_

LEIA

"Water," said the witch, stepping out of the hut and into the blistering morning. "Two buckets, girl. Now."

Leia, bloody to the elbows from the carcass of the eopie she'd been tasked with butchering, sighed. She was only halfway through her morning chores and already Asajj was piling more work on her shoulders. That was the witch's method. Force Leia to work until her hands were blistered and her vision was blurry with lack of sleep, then make her work some more. Twelve years hadn't softened her. She was still the same, pale and thin and smirking, taciturn to the point of silence, the tattoos around her mouth faded by deathstick smoke.

"Let me finish my cuts and bring the slops out to Kaliri," Leia said, blowing an errant strand of hair out of her eyes. "The kreetles are going to get at the meat if we leave it out much longer, and I've only packaged about half—"

The witch shook her head. "Fetch the water," she repeated. "I'll deal with the carcass."

Leia frowned. The witch had never completed a task she'd set her student. "What?"

"Do as I say," the witch snapped, striding forward and rolling up her sleeves. She looked distracted, almost nervous beneath her usual facade of impatient irritation. "The next time you question me, you'll face my blade in the circle."

Leia stepped back from the gutted eopie and wiped her hands on a filthy rag she'd brought out for the purpose. "Sorry, mistress," she said. "I just thought—"

"Think less," said Asajj. She took up the carving knife Leia had set aside and began to saw at the eopie's tough tendons. The witch's anooba, Ena, looked up from the bone he'd been gnawing and whined plaintively as the urusai on the cliffside took flight in a flurry of leathery wings and brightly-colored wattles. The whole mesa could sense the witch's unease.

Leia inclined her head in a shallow bow, mostly to conceal her frustration with her teacher. When the witch ignored her, she turned and set off toward the steps.

* * *

The stair that led down to the witch's cistern had been cut from the raw stone of the cliff face abutting the mesa. It wound down around ancient rock formations, perilously narrow and smooth as glass, the wind forever howling and tugging at anyone who dared the steep descent. Even the desperate water bandits who might otherwise have been desperate enough to steal from the witch of the Jundland Wastes thought twice before risking their lives on the stair. The Tuskens who came sometimes to trade with Asajj and take counsel with her, though, seemed to find nothing strange about the harrowing climb. Leia had seen them playing a skipping game on the steps that had made her head swim just to watch.

The rancor was fishing in the basin when Leia, the water pole slung over her shoulders, empty buckets rattling at either end, reached the cavern at the bottom of the steps. A wide stone landing gave Kaliri a place to rest her bulk while she delved with one four-meter arm in the depths of the witch's greatest treasure: a natural freshwater spring.

"Silly," Leia said, setting down the buckets and easing Kaliri's two-meter hand out of the water with practised care. "No fish in there." She tickled the monster under her jaw as Kaliri bent down to nuzzle her shoulder. The rancor nearly knocked her into the basin, and Leia laughed and slapped Kaliri's nostrils in a mild rebuke.

The rancor chuffed agreeably, licking cold water from her claws, and clambered out with ease onto the cliff face. She often clambered down to hunt on the plain below, negotiating the sheer rock as easily as Leia might have climbed a ladder. Even now, Leia watched as the rancor launched herself off of the cliff and slammed bodily into a pillar of red sandstone, a ten-meter leap arrested by the huge beast sinking her claws into the column to slow her descent. She climbed down the rest of the considerable distance to the wastes at a rapid pace. She'd probably already scented the herd of dewbacks that had passed by in the morning.

"I guess I don't need to worry about feeding you," Leia said to herself. She turned back to the cistern, a pool of still, dark water as wide across as she was tall, and then remembered in despair the new torment the witch had condemned her to the week before.

You've wasting time fetching all that water by hand, she'd snapped while watching Leia, bloody-handed and sunburned, weave thornweft grass into screens to keep skettos out of the nuna coop. From now on you'll fill the buckets with the Force.

Leia, resigned to her fate, sat down cross-legged on the landing and banished her dismay. The Witch's words echoed in her mind as she attempted to summon and focus her will. We are drowning in the Force. From our first breath to our last, it is the air we breathe and the blood that runs in our veins. It is the chains that lash us to ourselves and to the world. You need not let it in; you need only acknowledge that it is already there.

The first bucket rose, wobbling, and the second followed it. Together, they drifted toward the cistern and dipped beneath its waters. Leia struggled to maintain control, her breathing quickening as her fingernails dug into her palms. The extra weight isn't there, she told herself. The water isn't real. That water isn't real. The water isn't real.

Her eyelids fluttered as the buckets rose up dripping from the cisterns. Guiding them to a safe landing took everything she had. Her reflection in the disturbed water was white and trembling, her eyes underscored by sleepless crescents. She rose, bent, and slung the buckets back over the pole. The weight on her shoulders grounded her as she turned to look out over the wastes where Kaliri's galloping form was a distant smudge on the horizon. She had a long climb ahead of her.

For an instant, as the buckets rose, she'd thought she'd glimpsed something in the cascade of falling droplets.

A tower of smoke. Skeletons writhing in flame.

A faceless man, armored in night.

* * *

The climb back to the mesa was twice as hard as the descent, a grueling slog that left Leia puffing and red-faced, her legs burning, her sunburned shoulders quaking beneath the burden of the buckets on their pole. The kiss of fresh air, dry and hot as it was, when she escaped the shadow of the cliff was relief itself. The sight awaiting her was markedly less reassuring. In twelve years the witch had never permitted guests, apart from A'Sharad Hett and the Tuskens of Silent Stone Falling Downward. Even Leia's rare visits with her aunt and uncle happened there, at the farmstead; the witch said Leia was all the outside world that she would lower herself to speak to.

Now a shiny golden protocol droid stood outside the hut beside a squat R2 unit with blue decals and a grubby, battered chassis. Leia stopped, her buckets swaying on their pole. Seeing droids at the hut was like seeing a bantha in an evening gown.

"Good day, mistress!" the droid chirped, spotting her and raising his arms in greeting. "I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations, and this is my colleague, R2-D2. Say hello, R2." He banged a metal hand on the astromech droid's dome. Its only response was to make a long, rude sound like a balloon deflating.

"You'll have to excuse him," C-3PO lamented, turning back to Leia as the astromech put down its third tread and rolled away with a salvo of beeps and whistles. "He refuses to consent to a memory wipe, and you know how these R2 units get."

"Pleasure to meet you, 3PO," said Leia, still mystified. She crossed the fifty yards between the hut and the head of the stair at an easy lope, keeping her eye out for any other little surprises. There was no sign of Ena. Still uneasy, she set down her buckets and emptied them both in the hut's hydrostatically sealed catch basin where they would stay cool rather than evaporating in the heat of the day. The R2 droid was inspecting profogg holes with its holocam, flashing lights down the tunnels to spook the surly rodents. Leia smiled despite herself.

"Where are you coming from, 3PO?" she asked.

"The Lars farmstead on the edge of Mos Espa," the droid blustered, obviously pleased to be addressed. "Master Owen purchased us just yesterday and I had the most delightful oil bath after our—"

Leia's confusion deepened. "The Lars farm?"

"Oh yes. We were meant to go straight to Master Kenobi, you see, but, well, it's rather a funny story—"

"Tell me later," Leia interrupted firmly. "The Larses, Master Owen and his wife; they're all right? Are they here?"

"They remained at the farmstead and were in fine health when we left, mistress, I assure you—"

"Thanks," she said, feeling a twinge of guilt at cutting the enthusiastic droid off mid-flow again. "You've been a real help, 3PO. Make sure your friend doesn't bother the rancor."

3PO's eyes dimmed. "The rancor?" he quavered.

Grinning, Leia palmed the moisture lock's palm pad and slipped into the hut.

* * *

Inside, the witch was speaking with a stranger, an old man in a hooded brown robe worn over a roughspun farmer's tunic. His face was lined and weather-beaten, his greying beard neatly trimmed. The witch's arms were folded, her expression cold. Ena stood at her side, hackles raised and jaws agape.

"And I'm telling you she isn't ready," she snapped. "I had the street to teach me; she's only had me. If she goes out there now, the Inquisitors and the Hands will smell her, find her, and rip her apart."

The old man spotted Leia first. "Hello," he said softly. There was something like regret in his worn voice.

"Took you long enough, girl," sneered Asajj. Her fury was bottled and gone in an instant, her icy composure restored. "You did it the right way? If not, you march your empty head back down those steps and do it again."

"I used the Force, Mistress," Leia mumbled, blushing. She'd been caught off guard and the sorrow in the old man's words disarmed her. "I did it right."

Asajj nodded sharply as though that settled everything.

"What's going on?" Leia asked. The plaintive tone in her voice was dismaying, a child's confused whine. "Who is this?"

"Your father's master," said the witch. "Obi-Wan Kenobi."

"We met once before," said the man, offering a tired smile. "You were very young; I'm not surprised you don't recall."

"What? I thought — I thought Obi-Wan was dead!" She caught herself, flushing at the look of amusement on the old Jedi's face. "I'm sorry, sir—Master Obi-Wan, sir." She gave up and rounded on the witch, anger cracking through the mask of deference she usually wore. "Why is he here?"

"Your training is over, girl," spat the witch. "Whatever I've pounded through your skull is all the stands between you and the agents of the Empire. May the Force be with you." Turning her back on Leia, she said no more.

Leia's ears were ringing. She couldn't quite believe what the witch had said. _My training is over?_ Hot shame followed. _She doesn't think I'm ready._

Before she could assemble her thoughts, the old man had approached her and produced a shining metal cylinder from the sleeve of his robe. He held it out, proffering it. "Your father's lightsaber," he said. "A more elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Now it belongs to you."

Asajj snorted.

The lightsaber felt heavy and cold in Leia's hand. Numb, she could think of nothing to say. Her father had held this. He'd fought with it. Had he died with it still in his hands? She depressed the palm grip and a meter-long blade of blue light cohered in the air, its heat washing her face and arms. It hummed gently until she killed the power and let it fade.

Hers. It had been his, and now she held it. It was the closest that she'd ever been to the man she'd never known, the great pilot, the dashing Jedi. Her mother might remain a nameless phantom, but her father's legacy was hers now. She felt a brightness in her stomach, a weightless feeling of possibility.

"Thank you," she managed at last.

Obi-Wan smiled. "The time has come to end my hermitage," he said. "The Rebel Alliance has asked that I undertake a mission to deliver something of vital importance to Alderaan. If you wish it, Leia, you will accompany me and learn not just the secrets of the Force but the ways of the Jedi Order. As I trained your father—" a strange expression crossed his face, so briefly Leia couldn't be sure that she'd seen it, that mingling of grief and love, sorrow and fear "— so will I train you. Our fire has gone out; it is time it was kindled again."

And just like that, her time on Tatooine, backwater of backwaters, was over. She felt like kicking free of the hut and soaring out into the air, like kicking the water buckets off the cliff. No more chores, no more tedium, no more days passed in bored, aching, blistered silence while the witch, unspeaking no matter how much Leia railed at her, made her dig ditches and then fill them in. Even the grief at knowing she might never see her family again, might never run with Kaliri or tussle with Ena in the dust, even that was tempered with the wildness brought on by the promise of the stars. Alderaan! The Rebel Alliance! She felt a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

The droid's voice, muffled by the airlock, disrupted her ecstatic wanderings.

"Master Kenobi! Master Kenobi!" cried C-3PO. "Come quickly! I'm afraid that something...something has gone terribly wrong!"

Leia forced the door and dashed out onto the windswept mesa, her heart already sinking as the witch and Obi-Wan came hurrying in her wake.

"Oh, no," she whispered, halting as though someone had sunk a fist into her belly. The sound of droplets plunking into still water echoed in her memory.

On the horizon, near where the Lars farm stood, smoke rose black in a billowing spear.


	3. Chapter Three: Alone

CHAPTER THREE: ALONE

LEIA

The burning horizon. Smoke rising up in towers.

Leia turned and ran, sprinting past Kenobi, the witch, and the droids with Ena loping in her wake and howling at the top of his lungs. Her heart thumped against her breast. Her breath came in great gulping inhalations as her legs ate distance, flying over the uneven hardpan of the mesa. The cries of the hatchling ursai on the cliff above felt like the pulse of some enormous and inexorable alarm, like a warning from the sky that things were going wrong.

_I have to go._

“Leia, wait!” the old man cried, but he was far behind and fading, a lonely figure silhouetted against the boundless sky and the black worm of deathly smoke scrawled thin across it. Leia, shoving her father’s lightsaber into her belt, barreled heedlessly down the canyon where twelve years ago her uncle had carried her to meet the witch, where Kaliri had stopped her from running away on her first night in the hut. The same cool, focused light that had guided her steps then was with her now as she pelted down the rugged incline, bridge boards shaking under her feet.

The battered two-man airspeeder Uncle Owen had given her on her thirteenth birthday sat concealed beneath camouflage netting in one of the canyon’s countless dead-end branches. She flung herself into the cockpit, scrabbling up the flight nacelle and into the sweat-stained seat. She ran halfway through preflight before launching hot, the speeder’s protesting repulsors shaking rubble from the canyon walls.

As stone rushed past and gave way to the trackless blue, she glimpsed Ena running in agitated circles below and, further back, Asajj and Obi-Wan making their own way down the canyon’s winding course. Tears blurred her vision and she wiped them away, banking in a wide arc and cutting the speeder’s engine loose. She shot out and over the mesa, acceleration pushing her back into the seat’s reactive padding as the ache in her throat spread to her chest.

* * *

 

The fire was dying when she reached the farm. Leia gunned the speeder and shot toward the dwindling blaze, dropping down and slewing to a halt with tears in her eyes as the wave of sand thrown up by the speeder’s repulsor wash drifted away on the wind, disintegrating in an instant. She climbed out, her limbs as heavy as durasteel bars, and stared at the ruin of her aunt and uncle’s home. The farm lay blackened beneath a haze of smoke, pale tongues of flame still licking out from its doorways and from the droid pool. The southern wall of the courtyard had collapsed, spilling an ocean of sand into the homestead’s interior. Several of her uncle’s ‘vaporator towers lay like toppled spires of stone around the burning ruins, their precious harvest leaking away into the air and the sand.

Leia walked among the devastation, every step raising puffs of ash from the layers of prefabbed duracrete that had flaked and burned off of the farm’s central hab dome. Here and there lay pieces of dismantled farm droids, all with their positronic brains ripped free and ugly cavities left behind in heads and chests. A numbness descended on her as the fire’s heat beat against her face. Its colors coiled and rippled, flaring white and red and yellow as it licked the fraying edges of the house where she’d been raised. She walked on, hand over her mouth to keep out the smoke that stung her eyes and burned her throat.

She found them by the gutted frame of the glass garden. The fire had stripped away their flesh. Only bones remained, two skeletons side by side on sand their executioners had turned to glass with the fury of their blaster fire. Their clothes, perhaps their skin, hung from the girders of them in dark swags of soft grey ash so fine the merest kiss of wind blew them to tatters. Heat radiated from their deaths, as though some fissile property within them had been loosed by the flames. Behind them, the glass garden where Aunt Beru had grown gourds and mikel leaf belched black smoke from its devastated innards. Hydroponic tanks shattered, the fish and water within already evaporated or carbonized by the heat. Plants reduced to thin black sticks and leaves disintegrating in the rising air.

Leia sat down without meaning to, her legs folding under her. The sand was hot. The bones of her aunt and uncle swam before her as she dug her palms into her eyes, trying to displace the day’s events with sheer force. _I should say something,_ she thought. _I should say something over them. A prayer._

Smoke rose from their blackened bones in twists and spirals. It snaked away to join the oily towers that still rose from the droid pool and the farmstead’s sunken courtyard and the wreck of the glass garden. Leia rose, teetering on unsteady feet, and staggered through the blowing fumes to the prefab shed beside the gardens. Flames were steadily eating through its south wall, devouring the heat insulation blown between its duracrete layers, but the tools and materials inside were unharmed by the heat and darkness rolling around them. She took a long-handled spade and sprinted back out of the shed’s smoky interior, falling to her knees a few yards distant to hack up a lungful of blackened spit. Throat raw, she levered herself back up and stumbled on toward the swath of clear, hard-packed ground just north of the farm.

* * *

 

_“Your uncle and I thought this would be a nice place for the addition,” said Aunt Beru to Leia as they organized ‘vaporator components on the dusty tarp laid out on the hardpan. The older woman’s tone was light, but her sidelong look told Leia everything she needed to know._

_“I’m not going to live here forever, Aunt Beru,” she sighed. “I know you need my help around the farm, but there’s a whole world out there._

_“We miss you, dear,” her aunt replied. “One month a year and a few scattered appearances is hardly enough. And when that...woman is done with you, you’ll need time to get your feet beneath you.”_

_Leia nudged an actuator coil with her toe, moving it into alignment with its mates. “Maybe,” she said, hoping that a measured surrender would spare her the rest of the conversation. “Are we missing a coolant exchange cell?”_

_Aunt Beru ignored the question. “That Antilles boy asked after you last time we went up to Tosche Station. He’s a looker, that one. You could do worse!”_

_Leia blushed. “Aunt Beru!”_

_Her aunt laughed, peeling off her work gloves and wiping sweat from her brow. “I knew I could bring my Leia out,” she said, squatting beside her niece and putting an arm around the younger woman’s shoulders. She kissed Leia on the cheek, then looked down at the tarp._

_“Hmm,” she said. “I think you’re right, dear. Something’s missing…”_

* * *

 

Leia sat beside the open graves she’d dug in the hard earth, staring at the second sunset. It looked like blood on the horizon.

The fires had gone out. Her hands were blistered from the shovel’s rough grip and from the heat of the bones she’d buried, her face streaked with tears long since dried. She sat with her wrists draped over her knees, the wind driving grit against her as ashes flurried like a sand storm in the gusts that howled out over the wastes. Tatoo II seemed to melt as it set. Its last light spread out thin along the edge of the world, and then it was gone.

Kaliri found her there a few hours later, halfway glare-blind and shaking, her palms oozing clear fluid where she’d dug her nails into them. Leia barely felt it when the rancor, with uncanny stealth for all her massive size, slipped out of the night, scooped her up in one huge claw, and carried her away into the gathering starlight. Kaliri’s hide was cool and rough, the bellows rumble of her breathing a familiar comfort. Leia closed her eyes.

Silence came over her.

* * *

 

The world swayed with the rhythm of the rancor’s stride as consciousness slowly returned to Leia. She blinked sleep from her eyes, stifling a cry at the stiffness that had settled in her joints and back after her long, brutal labor and the jarring, thumping method of her transit. They were deep in the wastes, by her reckoning, Kaliri loping along easily on three limbs through the last thin light of the moon. _I slept through the night,_ she realized with dulled wonderment. _It happened yesterday, now._

Kaliri’s grunting cough of greeting stirred her to attention. The rancor halted, sinking down onto her haunches and lowered Leia down close to the ground. Obi-Wan and the droids stood a short way off on the sands of the open wastes, a rustbucket speeder that must have belonged to the old Jedi hovering behind them. For miles around them in every direction, there was nothing.

Leia slid down from Kaliri’s massive palm. She swayed. Behind her, the rancor seemed utterly unperturbed by Kenobi’s presence, even in the absence of any reassurance from Asajj. With a low roar, almost gentle, she snuffled at the top of Leia’s head and licked her hair into a spitty cowlick with her rough purple tongue, and then she rose again and shambled off into the fraying night to resume her hunt. Watching the rancor go, Leia felt a pang of loss so sharp and bitter that she nearly moaned aloud.

“My goodness, Mistress Leia!” C-3PO exclaimed. “Your hands!”

At 3PO’s side, the R2 unit made a worried _bloop_ -ing noise.

“They’re dead,” Leia said. Her voice sounded distant and small. “It’s all burned.”

Obi-Wan nodded, an ineffable sadness in his deep-set eyes. “The Empire must have tracked the droids here shortly after your uncle gave them over to me. They won’t be far; getting off-planet may be more difficult than I anticipated.”

Leia hugged herself against the chill of night in the open desert. “Where’s Asajj?”

“She has gone ahead to Mos Eisley, to find a pilot.” The old man’s look of sympathy is enough to turn Leia’s stomach. “Thee path we walk is not an easy one, Leia, and what awaits us at Alderaan, the secret we carry, I cannot guarantee—”

“I don’t care,” Leia interrupted, a tendril of shivering conviction growing steadily from the ashes in her belly as white-hot fury at the witch burned through her. _She knew what the smoke meant, and she ran away._ Each word she spoke she meant more than the one before it. “I’m ready to go with you. I want to learn the ways of the Force, to become a Jedi, like my father. I want...”

Her voice broke. Back to the north, the last shreds of smoke were blowing away in the thin, cool light of morning.

“I want to leave this place.”

DARTH VADER

Through the corridors of the Death Star, each turn and atrium freighted with the ghosts of banished memories, he walked at Tarkin’s left hand like a hound at its master’s side. It chafed him to do it, to make himself subservient to this gaunt, disdainful man who knew nothing of the Force’s mysteries, nothing of the Sith or of the Jedi, this man who had been born to power and had failed at every turn to develop any interests or personality beyond the pursuit of more. But the Emperor had commanded it. His edicts were clear. Tarkin’s doctrine was ascendant, Tarkin’s star at court doubly so. And Vader was to be his fist.

They walked in silence, Tarkin treating Vader with as much regard as he would give a servant droid scuttling along in his wake. He had forced the Dark Lord of the Sith to stand while he finished his lunch in his elegant drawing room, a holographic view of some bustling Eriadu trade plaza looping behind him. A false window to a dirty world and the sound of the Grand Moff’s lips smacking as he slurped down Corellian clams. This was the price of Vader’s failure to recover the plans to the Death Star.

The conference room, buried deep in the Grand Moff’s apartments aboard the Death Star, was a primer in Imperial decor with its long black table, uncomfortable chairs, and unornamented walls. The entire space called attention to Tarkin’s seat, leaving nothing else to which the eye might be drawn. The Joint Chiefs of the Fleet and Army were already present and quarreling, a collection of unpleasant men elevated as often out of expediency as for any innate talent they possessed. Their voices rang from the bare, dull bulkheads.  

“Until this battle station is fully operational, we are vulnerable,” said General Tagge, pounding a fist on the table. “The Rebel Alliance is too well-equipped! They’re more dangerous than you realize.”

“Dangerous to your starfleet, General,” sneered Admiral Motti. “Not to this battle station.”

Tagge flushed. “The Rebellion will continue to gain support in the Imperial Senate—”

“The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us,” Tarkin said crisply as he strode across the room toward his seat, the Joint Chiefs rising with much scraping of chairs and muttering of greetings as he passed. “I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the Council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.”

Resuming his seat, Admiral Thrawn frowned at the news. Thrawn was an oddity among the stiff collars and heavy jowls of the crowd of Moffs and Navy men around the table. First, he was the only alien in the room. Second, he seldom spoke. Third, he knew how to make war. Vader didn’t trust the quiet Chiss, his species itself half a mystery, his days devoted to trips to museums of arts and culture and to what Palpatine’s spymaster, Cronal, assured Vader was a truly unimaginable number of correspondence games of Dejarik, Intrigue, and Hrovikian Chess. To anyone who had never seen him hold a command, he might have appeared a wealthy, handsome dilettante. Perhaps he cultivated the idea; it would be a dangerous underestimation for an opponent to make.

Tagge looked stunned. “Impossible. Without the bureaucracy, how will the Emperor maintain control?”

Tarkin’s jaw worked. From his place just behind the Grand Moff’s chair, Vader could see the little bald spot the thin man worked so hard to conceal. “The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.”

Tagge shot a nervous glance at Vader. “And what of the Rebellion? If the rebels have obtained a complete schematic of this station, it is possible — however unlikely — that they could discover a weakness and exploit it.”

“The plans you refer to will soon be back in our hands,”

Admiral Motti’s perpetual smirk worked itself into a leering grin, the sort of look that Vader imagined would have gotten a man with fewer family connections quietly shoved out an airlock years ago. “Any attack the rebels could mount against this station would be a useless gesture, no matter the data they’ve obtained. The Death Star is now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use it.”

“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve created,” Vader rumbled. “The ability to destroy a planet is nothing next to the power of the Force.”

Tarkin looked bored.

Motti, though, his upper lip shiny with sweat, his pate glistening, could not restrain himself. “Your sorcerer’s ways don’t frighten us, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes.”

Family connections or no, it was a miracle that Conan Motti had survived to adulthood. Vader raised his hand and _squeezed_ the air, fingers hooked.

Motti tugged at his collar as an ugly flush spread from his neck to his cheeks. When he spoke, he sounded strained. “Or given you clairvoyance enough to find the hidden Rebel f-f-fortre—” His words trailed off into an airless rattle. His bulging eyes darted around the table at the other men assembled, some of whom looked ready to bolt. Tarkin was inspecting his fingernails. Thrawn looked rather amused.

“I find your lack of faith disturbing,” said Vader, wondering idly how long Tarkin would let him draw this out.

Motti gagged, clawing at his throat as his face slowly purpled. Spittle dribbled down his chin as he coughed and wheezed, his breath a horrible, thready whistle. Moff Panaka, a scowl twisting his heavy features, looked ready to intervene at any moment. It felt, for an absurd moment, disquieting to toy with Motti’s life in front of Panaka and Tagge, men who had known Vader before his entombment. Before he had come into his power and discarded the weak husk of his old self. _What would they think, if they knew who I was?_

“Enough of this,” Tarkin finally chided. “Vader, release him.”

“As you wish,” said Vader. He lowered his hand and Motti slumped forward onto the table, gasping and coughing, a look of purest hate etched into his sniveling features. The urge to step forward and break the man’s skull against the polished black boma wood was almost too much to resist, but Vader kept his place. He obeyed, for now.

“This bickering is pointless,” said Tarkin. “Lord Vader will provide us with the location of the hidden Rebel fortress. Once we have it, we will destroy the Rebellion in one swift stroke.”

The room fell silent as Tarkin rose. The Grand Moff surveyed his subjects with icy detachment. “You will be ready for full deployment on my command,” Tarkin said to those assembled, ignoring Motti’s continued wheezing. “Prepare your men, and do not disappoint me. Any further failures and it is the Emperor’s displeasure you’ll face. The loss of the plans and Lord Vader’s inability to recover them have placed us all on notice.”

He strode from the room. Vader stood for a moment and watched him go, ignoring the stares and mutters of the Joint Chiefs.

He wondered, fist clenched and creaking at his side, the place at the Emperor’s side he’d lost everything to take now hanging by a thread, how long Tarkin could go without air.

LUKE

Luke was alone. In the bitter cold of his cell, the only light a glaring glowstrip which was never dimmed or shut off, it was hard to gauge the passage of time. Meals came through a slot in the base of the door, or else they didn’t and Luke was left to hug his knees and try to focus on anything besides the gnawing hunger in the pit of his stomach or the screams that filtering in from the adjoining cells.

For as long as he could remember, he had been surrounded by people. His mother the queen, his father Bail, her senator and delegate. Tutors, guards, and palace staff. Droids of every type and function. The noise and bustle of the royal palace, built high among the mountains of the Alderaa range, its spires lost among drifting clouds, had been his world for seven years until his father had ushered him onto Alderaan’s little corner of the galactic stage. In the Senate he was no less surrounded, though he had learned, he thought, what it was to feel alone in a crowd as endless as the sea.

 _I’ve never really been alone,_ he thought, staring at the bulkhead opposite his narrow cot. Some previous occupant had tried to keep a log there, scratched in tidy columns into the durasteel with a fingernail or some hidden implement. Hundreds of thin scratches marched across the bulkhead before some mania had seized the hand inscribing them and turned the last rows into branching spirals like a deranged map of manmade riverlands. The spirals filled the far left corner of the bulkhead. Staring at them was better than trying to count the days their maker had lasted. Luke imagined it, his life stretching on and on in this place, circumscribed by the crushing vastness of the Death Star. He hadn’t seen it; he’d come in blindfolded, but he could feel the weight of it. An ocean of durasteel, a hive that pulsed and teemed with orderly life. It bore down on him when he lay waking in his cot, that weight.

And when sleep did come, he dreamed of his mother’s court on Alderaan, of the lacy soapstone filigree that separated the throne where Queen Breha sat with the other Justices of the Planetary Chambers from the deep cylindrical shaft of the audience hall where petitioners gathered each day on the tiered marble steps to lay their cases before their ruler. When she pronounced her rulings, the words echoed and re-echoed from the walls and stirred the kheshi birds that nested in the alcoves of the chamber’s uppermost third to flight, and their flight made words that dissolved and repeated in midair. White wings beating in the cross-hatched shadow. And then the dream would change. He saw a woman, dark-haired and lovely, looking down at him as though he lay curled in her arms. The world no more than the smell of her and the warmth of her body.

He saw a garden, trees manicured, little rivers running in neat courses. Unfinished. Loam still waiting for the flowers and ferns it would receive.

She knelt there, by the water.

Praying.

* * *

 

On Luke’s fifth day imprisoned, he thought, they opened his cell door and let him watch as two Stormtroopers dragged Melodi Eran, an officer in the Royal Guard serving aboard the _Tantive,_ away down the echoing passageway, twin streaks of blood unfurling where her bare feet slithered over the deck. Her face, a shiny mask of bruises and cuts, nodded slack at the end of her ligature-banded neck, and her sobs echoed loud in the block until the sentry posted outside Luke’s cell keyed the door shut, the sight of Eran’s lacerated back shrinking to a sliver, and then, with a whine of hydraulics and the hiss of an airseal activating, to nothing.

Luke sank back down onto his cot. He was trembling, his heart pounding in his chest. His soiled and sweat-stained tunic, jacket, and leggings felt suddenly as suffocating as the planetary bulk of the Death Star stretching away in every direction. He yanked at his collar, trying to bring his breathing back under control as the slick, slippery trails Eran’s feet had left slithered and hissed through his mind’s eye. He knew where that road led. He knew that he would walk it, too.

He’d tried to prepare himself for the possibility. Boarding the _Tantive_ in orbit over Alderaan, the spiral clouds of the planet’s southern pole vast beyond the viewports, he’d known. Threading the asteroid fields around Serenno, hearing the long-range com uplink chime as the groundside packet finished transmitting, he’d known. But knowing only got you so far. Now his death wasn’t an abstract out there somewhere in the galaxy, or even the random malevolence of the battlefield. Now his death stood just outside the door to his cell, sharpening its claws on the unpainted durasteel.

Somewhere, her voice ringing through the baffled vents or through some hidden vox caster, Eran began to scream.

* * *

 

The cell doors slid open without warning and the bleach-white light of the cell mingled with that of the hall in Luke’s blurred vision as he scrambled from his cot and onto the freezing deck, the hour or so of sleep he’d snatched running like sand through his fingers. An ache built in his ears, accompanied by a whine like the buzzing wings of some blood-sucking insect.

In the doorway stood Darth Vader, left hand of the Emperor, fallen master of the Jedi Order. His suit looked like a funerary statue, like something carved to memorialize the life and death of a tyrant rather than to case the flesh and mortal substance of a man. When he stepped into the cell, Luke saw the spherical interrogation droid hovering in the hall behind him, its single red photoreceptor unblinking and malevolent. Syringes and neural probes rose glistening from the smooth black surface of its chassis. Devices to rip secrets out of uncooperative flesh.

“Your Highness.” Vader’s machine-roughened voice thumped against the bulkheads, filling Luke’s cell so completely that it knocked the air from the prince’s lungs. “Where is the Rebel base?”

Luke shook his head, retreating before the Dark Jedi’s imposing bulk until his back hit the bulkhead. His breath still wouldn’t come. On the star destroyer’s bridge Vader had seemed distracted, his fury unfocused. Even cracking the bridge viewscreen had seemed more a mistake than a calculated act of intimidation. Unnerving, certainly, to see rage slip the bounds of the mind and twist reality in its shaking hands, but now the full force of that brittle, furious will was directed at Luke, and the simple truth was that no human could survive its weight. For two decades Vader had been the Emperor’s hammer, hunting down Jedi across the galaxy, laying siege to Separatist holdouts and brushfire rebels, pounding Imperial space until it took on the desired shape, then quenching each resultant blade in the blood of what few dissidents remained.

“Your resistance is admirable,” said Vader, “but useless. Where is the location of the Rebel base?”

His voice was hypnotic, the blank craters of his helmet’s eyes like singularities the pull of which Luke could not escape. He could feel the frail bones of his throat bending against the pressure of Vader’s sorcerous grip, the arm of the murdered Jedi Order reaching out across the years to throttle him in this dreary box of a room. And something else, like a headache pushing its way into the recesses of his skull, a traveling tremor that made spit run down his chin and sent cold shocks racing down his spine. His eyes twitched. His fingers went numb. A myriad little ills afflicted him as the Force pried at his mind with icy fingers. He could feel the secret bubbling up from somewhere deep within him, could feel his body readying itself to reject it like poisoned food retched up to spare the body worse.

His mother had engaged a tutor for him in his youth, a blindfolded man who stank of whiskey and never trimmed his hair or beard. Their sole endeavor together had been meditation, the emptying of the mind, and the man had pressed his lessons as hard as was possible. Screaming in Luke’s ears, beating him about the head and shoulders with a stick, even jabbing him with a stun prod while he tried to keep his focus. The man had vanished in Luke’s fifteenth year, disappearing one day from his cluttered apartments in the bowels of the castle, but not before he left a kernel of immaculate silence in his long-suffering student’s brain.

It was to that kernel, that knothole in the trunk of his mind, that Luke withdrew before Vader’s assault. He felt the monster’s questions ring him like a bell, felt the awful pressure on his throat and lungs increase, squeezing breath from him in horrid increments.  He heard his own voice answer, heard quavering denial and belligerent rebuke. Through the knothole of his focus he could see the blood unspooling across the deck, could feel the vrelt-shakes-womp-rat violence of Darth Vader’s grip on his mind and the burning limbs of the interrogation droid beginning its long and grisly work. He felt the dismal tide of pain roll through him, heard the garbled pleas his body spat and blubbered.

Vader’s plucking fingers worked the air and searing light split Luke from jaw to ear as a molar tore free of his mouth and clattered over the deck, strings of bloody flesh pinwheeling after it. Blood drooled from his trembling mouth as he fought upright again, as the ghost guiding his body forced him up on the sweating poles of his arms where needle marks marched in the wake of the hovering droid’s attentions.

 _Death came into the cell,_ he thought.

“You are strong,” came Vader’s voice through the fog of agony that still held Luke in trembling thrall. “But you can’t last forever. Perhaps when I return, you will be ready to put aside this stubborn foolishness.”

The cell doors opened, light melding once more with light, and the black mote of the droid withdrew with a murmur of repulsors, sheathing its needles and its blades as it went. Vader lingered just outside the door a moment longer, the dark hulk of something that had been a man, the tendrils of his power pulling free of the flesh of Luke’s thoughts and reeling back into their corrupt host.  “I sense much fear in you,” he said. “Imagine your mother in your place, and set aside your mistaken allegiance to the Rebel Alliance. They are doomed.”

The finality of his words tolled in the stillness.

Luke spat blood on the deck, his self still recessed deep in darkness. Defiance was an instinct, a reflexive shudder of the body.

The doors slid shut, eclipsing Vader’s towering frame.

Luke was alone again.

HAN

“So what you’re telling me,” Han said to the sinuous Sluissi starport bursar staring disdainfully at him from behind the grimy duraplast security screen, “is that my ship, the love of my life, is behind that blast door, and you’re not going to open it for me?”

The Sluissi sighed, a sound of supreme boredom like a bellows pumping stale air through a book repository. “Not until all outstanding fines are settled, Captain Solo.”

Han glanced over his shoulder as a stormtrooper patrol passed by down the bustling avenue, shouldering their way through bands of Jawa merchants and the dregs of Mos Eisley’s cantinas and sabacc dens making their way back to their bolt-holes before the morning heat really hit. The stormtroopers weren’t rimward garrison rejects either, the kind Jabba and Tatooine’s other crime lords could buy for a bottle of the cheap stuff and a discount at the local brothel. These were hardcases right out of Korriban, son-of-a-bitch bucketheads with kill counts burned into their pauldrons and, probably, Palpatine’s face tattooed on the smalls of their backs.

Chewbacca growled at the sight of them. The two-meter Wookiee at Han’s side, confirmed by both casual inspection and rigorous testing to be more than capable of cracking a stormtrooper like a whip, had more than his share of reasons to hate the Empire, and their recent run-in with an Imperial patrol had left them both on edge. Being here, this close to what had to be some kind of hush-hush op involving a star destroyer in orbit and the Empire’s crack troops combing grimy spaceports and disappearing people left and right, was one more bad idea in a long series of bad ideas.

_The last thing we need is to throw down with Palpatine’s finest._

“Take it easy, Chewie,” Han muttered, scratching his chin. He needed a shave.

Chewbacca bared his teeth, then shrugged his massive shoulders and pointedly turned his back on the stormtroopers. The patrol passed on into the swelling crowds, skull-like masks streaked with grit from the endless Tatooine wind.

“There’s a line forming, Captain Solo,” the Sluissi droned, the dull slap of its voice dragging Han’s attention away from the terrors of life in the Empire. “Unless you plan to render payment on the matter at hand, there’s nothing I can do for you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Han griped, sweeping his landing ticket off the counter and into his vest’s inner pocket. “I’ll be seeing you again real soon, beautiful.” He backed away, shouldering aside the line of unruly and ungroomed sentients queueing up to speak to the Sluissi in its recessed cubby in the duracrete perimeter wall of the Mos Eisley Spaceport. “That ship leaves this berth without me in it? We’re gonna have words. You have teeth? Do Sluissi have teeth? Chewie, do you know if Sluissi have teeth?”

Chewbacca gave a noncommittal grunt.

The Sluissi’s long, dour face betrayed no hint of emotion.

“Well, if you do, you can kiss ‘em goodbye,” Han snarled, turning his back on the bursar’s box and the queue for same, some of whom were now eyeing him with what might have been murderous intent. “Try to get a little service around here and they take your ship, make out like you’re some kind of crook. Whole damn galaxy’s going to the gundarks.”

Chewbacca, plowing through a knot of hollering, fist-waving Jawas, offered up a long-suffering roar. He changed course as they left the spaceport behind and headed into the morning bazaar, a roughly informal thoroughfare lined with tents, stalls, and permanent storefronts catering to the needs of sweaty and exhausted spacers from across the sector. Cheap blasters, sizzling meat, twelve flavors of bored dockside working girl—you could have it all for the right price. Chewie bought a skewer of spicy dewback meat from a stall run by an enthusiastic Talz who threw in a little flatbread. A few yards away, a Chevin majordomo in heavy black robes haggled with a pair of Gotal dandies selling imported modules for water pipes.

* * *

 

“It’s not my fault!” Han said around a mouthful of flatbread as they trudged back across the city to the flophouse room they’d rented. “How was I supposed to know how close to broke we were running?”

Chewie’s answering roar was low, almost gentle.

Han sighed. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I shouldn’t have trusted her.”

They walked on in companionable silence for a while, admiring the sights and smells of Mos Eisly coming to life. A thousand starports on a thousand worlds, and Tatooine still managed to smell bad enough for the stink to stay lodged at the back of Han’s mouth for days after leaving. Jawas in their never-washed robes, offal from a dozen different species of beasts of burden, the mingled garbage of a hundred different sentient races, all of whom had extremely different ideas about what was and wasn’t food; the bouquet was something else.

“Listen, all we need is a contract.” Han stuffed the last of the flatbread into his mouth as they ducked into an alley shortcut, its stucco walls luridly decorated with suggestive images starring the local sector governors and a pair of amorous banthas. “We do a few favors for that Whiphid bigwig out in the Dune Sea, use the advance to get the _Falcon_ out of impound, get a hookup to run a little spice, maybe some surplus arms and armaments from Tatooine’s finest…”

Chewbacca groaned.

“Oh, suddenly you’re a critic?” Han kicked at a kreetle scuttling across his path. Ahead, their hostel bulked low on the far side of one of the city’s busier arteries. “We just dumped _six kilos_ of Jabba’s glitterstim into the Maw Cluster. He’s not gonna care we were running from the Empire; he’s gonna care about getting paid. We can’t do that, we’re sarlacc food.”

The Wookiee’s rejoinder was disparaging. He growled in complaint, then adopted a speculative look, tapping his lower lip with a claw. After a moment, he barked a suggestion.

“Passengers?” Han threw up his hands. “Why don’t we just knit doilies for the _Falcon_ ’s crash couches and turn her into a day retreat for bored Klatoonian den-wives? It might be faster, but hell, Chewie; I have dignity.”

A speeder screamed to a halt a bare few feet from Han and Chewie, its repulsors kicking up dust from the street. The Devish driver leaned out her window, honking the speeder’s horn as she did. “Get out of the road, you nerf-herder!”

“I’m walkin’ here!” Han shouted back, thumping a fist down on the speeder’s hood.

Chewie’s hand on his shoulder took him out of the moment. The speeder fishtailed around them, leaving them waist-deep, or knee-deep in Chewie’s case, in drifting clouds of grit. The Devaronian’s curses faded as the vehicle careened on out of view, frightening a towering ronto into sidestepping onto a fruit merchant’s cart. Panic engulfed the sidewalk, but Han barely noticed it. Across the street, stormtroopers were marching a long line of grubby, sleep-fogged sentients out of the hotel in stun cuffs. The flophouse proprietor, a massive woman by the name of Krana, lay face-down on the sidewalk with one trooper kneeling on her back and another busy cuffing her thick wrists.

Han swallowed. “On second thought, let’s go with your thing.”


End file.
